’Tis the time of year when periodicals are obliged to share their audited circulation information publicly, in small print in the back pages. It’s a law, so that publications can’t, for instance, lie about the size of their readership when soliciting advertisers.
I find that I am in a rather select club. I subscribe to all the regular Archie Comics titles (the ones featuring Archie and friends, that is, not the same publisher’s Sonic the Hedgehog or superhero series), and I’m noticing that none of these titles have more than 1000 subscribers or so. That’s worldwide, apparently. Total paid circulation of each Archie title tends to be in the 40,000 or 50,000 range, though well over twice that number of copies may be printed, returned by newsstands and presumably recycled. That process is as it always has been, though the numbers used to be much larger. Digital comics must take up a lot of the slack, as do variant covers and other enticements that goose sales of titles that last for only a few issues or a few years.
There used to be dozens of regularly published Archie comics. With this year’s cancellation of the Life With Archie magazine and the Kevin Keller Comic (which was the last vestige of the old Veronica title), there are now just eleven. Seven of those are digest magazines filled largely with reprints (not that I’m complaining; I’m really enjoying the reprints these days). Two are the slick, adult-oriented horror comics Afterlife With Archie and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. That means Archie is now publishing just two all-original comic-book sized comic books in the trad Archie mode: Archie (published monthly) and Betty & Veronica (bi-monthly).
I remain a loyal subscriber. In fact, I’d happily subscribe to a lot more Archie titles if they existed. But I get that I’m select audience—one of a thousand.