It's a trickier question than one realizes at first. You can't just compare the sales of Amazing Spider-Man today against those of last year. The book has folded into itself two lower selling titles, Spectacular Spider-Man and Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. These statistics have to be taken into account while discussing profitability.

However, since I'm about as good at math as John McCain is from separating himself from W, I'll leave the heavy lifting to Rich Johnston.

We're well into the "Brand New Day" relaunch of Marvel's Spider-Man property. So... how are sales doing? Have Marvel fans abandoned the series as many threatened, was it all hot air, has the series found new readers?

We have only certain sales figures to go on, they are orders by retailers, not sales to customers, they don't include sales outside of North America and they are often innaccurate. However, they have the benefit of being consistently innaccurate, enabling us to draw conclusion about certain trends And with the current FOC system of ordering, the order dates are much closer to sales dates, which over time makes it a greater barometer of cuistomer demand. So. Let's crunch numbers.

The first issue of Brand New Day, "Amazing Spider-Man" #546 had reported North American orders of 127,958. Very impressive, and the media coverage probably helped sales. As a three-times-a-month book, it was worth knowing the retailers ordered 101,213 of the second issue and 97,959 of the third. They expected a drop off. Issue 4 gets a bump of 101,112 with the new rotating creative team but two issues later, it's back down to 88,084. Which was where the book was pre-relaunch.

And so the sales slide. Month after month, sales drop. occasionally leaping for a new creative team before plunging back down. July's figures see the series in the high 60K figures, half of where the relaunch started from, a significant drop from the majority of JMS' run, and back down around the levels acheived towards the end of the John Byrne/Howard Mackie run which received such derision when the Quesada/Jemas tag team rose to prominence at Marvel.

However, because the other less-well-performing titles of "Spectacular Spider-Man" and "Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man" were cancelled, to be replaced by the increased three-a-month schedule for the better selling "Amazing Spider-Man", overall sales of the three Spidey books a month are up. Just.

What has happened is that "Amazing Spider-Man" has lost 30-50,000 readers since the relaunch. However those readers now buy all three Spider-Man titles a month instead of the one or two they used to pick up.

Selling more copies to less people is basically how the Direct Market became such a strong proposition to Marvel and DC and explains quite a number of publishing decisions along the line.

Marvel can consider this a success, but it does put the book in a more vulnerable position. If one reader leaves, they drop three books, not one. To gain a new reader, that reader must buy three books, not one.

And you might also conclude that a three-a-month book where Spider-Man was still married to Mary Jane, or where Peter Parker hadn't sold his marriage to the devil, would have sold more copies to more people.

Mind you, "Spider-Girl" sales aren't that great either. Just over 15,000, down around 2000 sales since Brand New Day and still dropping readers, despite being the place to go to find Mary Jane and Peter still married.

Comic fans. Can't live with them, can't publish a line of superhero comic books without them.