Red and Blue Make Green

She-Hulk and Swamp Thing are two superheroes that I've been following on and off since I was twelve. I've been buying up the trade paperback collections of She-Hulk and Swamp Thing on Amazon and half.com like crazy lately, and while I was jonesing for my latest Swamp Thing fix, it occurred to me that color might help explain the sales of superhero comic books.

I've always liked offbeat superheros - She-Hulk, Swamp Thing, Booster Gold, and Animal Man to name a few - and the two common denominators that they all share is middling sales and costumes or pigmentation consisting of unusual colors.

Since I was curious to see what impact color might have on the sales of super hero comic book, I crunched the sales figures for a number of different superheroes over the course of 2009:



A couple of notes about my data. The sales figures were pulled from this website. The Amazing Spiderman is the only title that comes out three or four times a month, while the Hulk, Green Lantern, and Batman were all featured prominently in major storylines that without a doubt goosed the sales of their titles.

While I'm hesitant to draw any conclusions about green, I think red and blue, or some combination thereof, is the clear winner when it comes to comic book sales:



Having been raised on a diet of "grim 'n gritty" comics from the eighties through the ought oughts, I'm surprised black isn't a more popular color. While Ms. Marvel and the Punisher outsell their blue and yellow counterparts, Booster Gold and Nova, they only do so by about a 75,000 copies a year.



White is the clear loser in terms of sales. There aren't that many superheroes that incorporate white as a major part of their costumes, but when they do sales fade faster than a pair of Levis in the wash.



Red and blue puts Marvel and DC in the black, while white puts them in the red. However, for this comic book reader, green is the only color that "pops" on the cover of a comic book.

Update: I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings for the Occasional Superheroine, but as further proof of my thesis that a white costume kills sales, Emma Frost (a superheroine who likes to fight crime in white lingerie) had her own solo series that made its debut in July, 2003. The first issue sold a respectable 54,107 copies, however, when the series was canceled in December of 2004, only 24,519 copies of the final issue were sold.