While we've witnessed the inevitable grieving, fist-shaking, boycotting and gnashing of teeth since Ock took over the webs in ASM #700, Superior Spider-Man has certainly done one thing right, sell lots of copies. Aided by the sheer moving power of Superior Spider-Man #1, the comic book industry has seen a 27% sales increase in January of 2013 over January of 2012. January also had a 3% sales increase over this past December, the largest increase from December to January in more than a decade. To top all of that off, according to Newsarama, comic book sales topped 41 million in the month of January for the first time since the mid-'90s.
It’s easy to see that Superior and other Marvel Now books that have renumbered their series in an effort to boost sales has skewed the data a bit, but this is a mammoth sign of life in the industry none the less. Let's see if any of these new fans really do "jump on" the Marvel Now line and continue to increase comic book sales throughout the new year.
For the numbers in all their glory, head on over to Newsarama.