The Force is with Marvel these days since taking on the Star Wars license for comics once everything slowly folded in under the Disney banner over the last couple of years. With the new series having launched this past January where the opening issue sold over a million copies, the series has settled well into the 200-250,000 range each month while other series are around that range as well, including Darth Vader.
The first collected edition is now set for an October 6th, 2015 release with Skywalker Strikes, which Amazon currently has marked at 51% off. The folks at ComicBook.com have learned that the first printing of the trade is now angling at about the same range with an upper expectation of 250,000 copies. Which is, as mentioned below, five times over their usual trade releases.
“When Star Wars #1 was released at the beginning of the year we were thrilled at the reception and the record-setting sales numbers. Once again, Star Wars continues to skyrocket the Marvel name even higher with the anticipated pre-order print-run between 200K and 250K units for Star Wars Vol 1 TPB,” said David Gabriel, SVP Print, Sales and Marketing. “This is an unheard of number, but given the success that we’ve had with Star Wars since January, including the insurmountable 5MM units across all the Star Wars’ series, second prints and overprints, we don’t see any issue in reaching such a number of printed copies of this highly anticipated collected edition.”
With the comics market having been all over the map for years, but mostly struggling often in the last few years for well known titles to hit the 100,000 threshold, the Star Wars saga is doing very, very strong and causing a lot of interest across the board. It may not be the heyday of the 90’s, where speculators had things into overdrive with far too many books selling millions of copies each month, but this is coming across as a lot more sustainable.
And coming from the manga side, looking at the sales numbers there, it’s definitely encouraging to see things performing well for the series. We expect to hear the numbers on this to only increase as it gets closer to the release with supplemental printings as interest goes into overdrive with The Force Awakens, but there’s also the digital side as well where a number of readers won’t buy singles but will buy digital trades instead through Amazon’s Kindle and ComiXology apps.
Suffice to say, Star Wars is definitely proving to be a major hit in the comics market once again, which after the series got me into comics in the first place back with the single digit issues in the late 70’s, it’s fantastic to see it reinvigorated like this.
Plot concept: The greatest space adventure of all returns to Marvel! Luke Skywalker and the ragtag rebel band opposing the Galactic Empire are fresh off their biggest victory yet – the destruction of the massive Death Star. But the Empire’s not toppled yet! Join Luke, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, C-3PO, R2-D2 and the rest of the Rebel Alliance as they fi ght for freedom against the evil of Darth Vader and his master, the Emperor! But when a Rebel assault goes very wrong, Han and Leia will have to think fast to make their escape…while Luke fi nds himself faceto-face with Darth Vader! In the explosive aftermath, a humbled Luke returns to Tatooine to learn more about his mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi. Meanwhile, Leia and Han undertake a vital – and dangerous -secret mission…but can they succeed without Luke?
