Wow.

Yesterday I reported that private polling of mine indicated that The Walking Dead #100 was about to smash through sales and become the best selling comic of July. I hedged my bet a little, but privately I was estimating sales of around 180,000 copies.

I was wrong, by a significant factor.

I have just been informed that preorders of the first print of The Walking Dead #100 have, so far, topped 300,000. Which would not only make it the best selling direct market comic of July, but the best selling direct market comic of the year, certainly as far as the first printing is to go by. It is possible that Avengers Vs X-Men may beat it but only after multiple prints, and a first print that effectively gave away most of its copies.

This is a truly astounding feat. It is no doubt helped by multiple covers, each featuring a big name artist, but even so, that means that each cover will outsell recent issues of the Walking Dead comic significantlyand, if counted separately, all five covers would be in the top twenty.

We still may not be at capacity of course. There were a million downloads of the first chapter of The Walking Dead game, and a TV audience of eight million. Who knows how many more people could be turned to the monthly comic experience…