Have you already figured out why an otherwise unremarkable issue of Mark Waid and Barry Kitson’s Amazing Spider-Man made it on this list? I’ll give you a hint: it was published on January 15, 2009.īut you’ve probably already guessed. Superman returned to his classic costume in the issue - with his underwear on the outside - for the first time in seven years, and the issue also contained the first few pages of Brian Bendis’ run on Superman, a big turn around for the legendary Marvel Comics creator.

Aside from the milestone in comics history it represented, and the wealth of creators DC was able to attract to fill its anthology, Action Comics #1000 had a few other perks to attract the interested collector. Action Comics #1000 is the first example of a trend we’ll see in the rest of the list, that is, the big anniversary blowout issue.ĭC Comics printed the 80-page giant with 11 different covers, which is par for the course with a book of its magnitude and era. Rounding out the bottom of our list are the two youngest comics on it, this one commemorating the 80th anniversary of the first superhero and the second oldest continually running superhero comic still on stands today: Superman, and Action Comics. With that in mind, here are the 10 best-selling American single-issue comic books, according to the most concrete numbers in the industry’s spotty history. We also owe a grudging debt to Diamond Comics distributors, for the company’s monopolistic takeover of the American comic book shipping market, and its regular reporting of comic book pre-order sales ever since. Our research owes a lot to Comichron’s detailed compilations of the categories of best-selling comics the site’s post about the difficulties of naming the “best-selling comics ever” is good and edifying reading. You wind up with a list more like “The 10 best-selling American single-issue comic books of all time that we have hard data on.” If you want to base everything on confirmed numbers, you’ve got to throw in quite a few caveats. And that’s without considering the apples to oranges comparison of America’s single issues method of distribution to, say, Japan’s doorstop-like weekly anthology magazines. There are decades of comics history where industry number-crunchers only counted how many issues of Superman and Captain America newsstands ordered, leaving historians with only hard sales numbers from 1997 onward. When it comes to determining the exact rundown of the best-selling comics of all time, the data is murky.

In 1991, X-Men #1 sold an estimated 8,186,500 copies, making it a likely contender for the best-selling single-issue comic book in history.

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