Comic Industry Expert Questions Whether DC Comics Lied About Absolute Batman #1 Sales

DC Comics made a post to their official blog claiming Absolute Batman #1 was 2024’s bestselling comic, but they’re being called out for potentially lying by both numbers provided by Bleeding Cool and comic industry expert Thinking Critical.

Absolute Batman #1 by Scott Snyder was hailed as DC Comics’ flagship book for DC All In, a desperate initiative the company did to try to increase sales as it was reported 66% of their monthly titles had sales numbers below the cancelation threshold this summer.

It seemed like nothing DC Comics did moved the needle. They just relaunched a large portion of their line again with Dawn of DC, and events like Mark Waid’s Absolute Power bombed with customers over the summer.

Enter Scott Snyder and another relaunch initiative in DC All In. The creator promised a return to Batman after years off of the title, hyping this Absolute line as a mirror of Marvel Comics’ Ultimate line, which saw tremendous success earlier in the year because of Jonathan Hickman’s Ultimate Spider-Man.

The marketing campaign was like few we’ve ever seen in recent comics history, and it’s been reported that the result was Absolute Batman #1 selling 400,000 copies between its print runs. Rich Johnston from Bleeding Cool first called foul on calling the book the bestseller of the year, as it was clear that Ultimate Spider-Man #1 sold 450,000 copies, beating the Batman book by a good margin.

But that 400,000 doesn’t mean there’s anywhere near that many readers. Upon a deep dive into Absolute Batman’s sales, a lot of smoke and mirror tactics are used to make the book look like far more of a success than it actually is.

Thinking Critical did an expose on exactly how DC Comics manipulated the market to make Absolute Batman look like far more of a success than it actually is. A lot of the Absolute Batman #1 sales numbers came from “retailer incentive variants” which DC Comics requires 3,000 copies of the original cover A to be bought before a retailer can purchase their own additional print run of an exclusive variant cover.

“DC Marketing literally did everything in their power to ensure this book was wildly successful,” Thinking Critical said. He went into detail explaining that DC Comics slashed the requirement to get in on an exclusive cover by half, allowing comic shops to purchase 1,500 books to get their own cover made, which created a glut of even more variant covers for Absolute Batman #1 than normal.

“There are probably shops out there that created four or five covers at a minimum,” Thinking Critical also said.

At such a level, they would have had to have ordered 7,500 copies of cover A just to get the book made to do such, which would have resulted in more than 10,000 orders total for a store to create these speculator-fueled covers.

Such exclusive covers rarely make it to reader hands, which means a very large portion of Absolute Batman #1’s sales are not real nor sustainable.

Fandom Pulse confirmed the numbers of the total sales are accurate, and that several shops did exactly what Thinking Crtitical alleged with our DC Comics insider. In talking to a retailer who asked to remain anonymous, the owner told Fandom Pulse he believes less than 30% of people who buy comics from his shop even read them. Most sales are to speculators.

Not only did DC Comics lie about having the highest sales of any comic in 2024 according to our sources and Bleeding Cool, but the numbers create a bubble which dooms DC Comics to yet another cycles of dwindling sales to real readers as it progresses along.

With DC Comics pulling out every stop to get retailers to buy in on speculation, they can only go back to this well so many times before it dries up, and it appears they’ve done little to actually entice new readers into the hobby for a sustainable future with their DC All In initiative.

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