This is your monthly reminder that Justice League 3000 is in stores today. The solicitation text begs us to buy it.

Beetle and Booster! Fire and Ice! The Injustice League (no, not that one — this is a different one)! Plus, the stuff that's on the cover! C'mon, people! We're bending over backward here! Pick up this comic before it's too late!

Breaking out the hard sell, I see. I will take this opportunity to point out that sales for the title got a boost in the issue that was mostly devoted to Booster Gold and Blue Beetle, (#12) and have slid some in the time since. I'm no one to tell Keith Giffen or J.M. Dematteis how to write a comic book, but I do humbly suggest that more Booster Gold and Blue Beetle might be a good thing.

You can find a preview for the issue at ComicBook.com.

(Footnote: I find it amusing that DCComics.com appears to be sabotaging their own title: the web page for this book promotes the wrong Blue Beetle in this issue. Their "starring" links ignore Fire and Ice and link visitors to the bio for Jaime Reyes, who is very unlikely to be along for this ride.)

Buy this issue and make Skeets (who is also very unlikely to appear in this issue) happy.

UPDATE 2015-03-05: THEY LIED TO US. Booster Gold and Blue Beetle DO NOT appear in this issue. Sorry.

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I don't think it's any secret that I don't care for the New 52. I know I'm not alone.

I often hear or read others with long-term DC Comics buying habits express disappointment with the change to the DC Universe. When we malcontents get together, someone invariably invokes sales numbers to prove that most people hate the New 52.

That sounds comforting, but is is true? I looked at the numbers to see for myself.

The naysayers have a point. The New 52 is dying a slow death, kept alive largely through increasingly regular injections of "events."

The graph above charts the sales since the launch of the New 52, and the trend lines make it clear that DC is losing ground to their Marvelous Competition. (Let's not pretend that DC's recent changes are anything other than an attempt to close the gap with Marvel, which is more successful in all ways, but especially in the one that counts: sales revenue).

Those spikes in the graph are the initial reboot and last year's "Villains Month" 3D covers. Those 3D covers really seemed to work. Expect to see them more often if this September's Futures End covers are anywhere near as successful. (Living from event to event? Why does that market strategy seem so familiar?)

But before I celebrate the proof that the New 52 is loosing steam, I should put that in perspective and look at what DC was doing before their re-branding:

Here I've extended my timeline backwards. We have sales data for 32 months of the New 52 universe, so I decided to look backwards the same distance before the relaunch. Frankly, they don't look so bad. (I can't even blame the sales dip for January 2011 on Flashpoint. That month saw a change in Diamonds' distribution practice, and was a low volume month across the board.)

Ah, but when I put the two timelines together, look what happens:

Look at that upswing! And it's probably better than it looks. All of my data comes from ComicChron.com and is based off Diamond Comics Distributors' coded sales charts. That means that my numbers are estimates that do not include digital sales. That probably means that the modern numbers are bigger and better than we can see (at least in months without fancy 3D covers).

It's true that a rising tide floats all boats, and the comics industry is currently experiencing something of a sales renaissance as the economy has rebounded from the Great Recession. However, DC is hitting sales numbers they haven't seen in over a decade. It would be foolish to credit most of that change to anything other than the excitement generated by the launch of the New 52.

Creatively, I still refuse to call the New 52 a success. I can still argue that rebooting to something that I might want to read — such as keeping Wally West as The Flash or reverting Superman to Silver Age godhood — may have produced better, longer lasting gains. What I cannot do is deny that the New 52 gave DC sales momentum unlike any in recent memory. The only question now is when DC will do it again.

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Out suspicions were confirmed earlier this week that DC Comics had near-record sales in September with its Forever Evil mini-series and tie-ins. For those of you who hate event books, remember this. Yes, they are usually mediocre, editorially driven stories. But boy howdy, do they sell!

ComiChron.com reports that DC Comics sold over 4 million copies of 129 different comics in September 2013. That made September sales nearly as good as those in the first week of their "New 52" initiative back in October 2011.

The good news is that DC looks healthy and wealthy, at least for the time being. Keep in mind that DC needs to stay in business if we're ever to see our Booster Gold in action again.

The bad news is that they sold all those books without so much as a mention of Booster Gold. With everything going so well (financially) right now at DC, we can't expect the company to feel any pressure to return Booster to action anytime soon.

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Now that the story is over and the numbers are in, I thought it would be fun to look at whether or not choosing to add Booster Gold to All-Star Western did anything to help its anemic sales. In short, the answer is "not really."

I've included the six months of sales prior to Booster's arrival (issues #13 through #18) in the graph for reference. It seems that Booster's arrival in issue #19 may have slowed the defection of readers briefly, but they resumed their flight from the title as the story wore on. If All-Star Western lives or dies based on sales numbers (and not Dan DiDio's favor), Booster's appearance might have bought the title one more issue.

Granted, the numbers in this chart are for print issues only and fail to account for any digital sales. Maybe the book sells like gangbusters online, although since All-Star Western appears in 407th place of ComiXology's "Top Titles" list, that seems unlikely.

Looking at the slope of sales decline, an unexceptional issue #19 should probably have been expected to sell about 16,400 copies. Instead, with Booster's help it sold 16,838 copies. Does that mean that adding Booster to a book boosts sales by 400 copies? If the sales of Smallville are any indication, we should probably assume that it was the "WTF" gatefold cover, not Booster's appearance, that drove up sales for the issue.

Booster's appearance in issue #13 didn't seem to move the sales needle. Sales continued on pace. Although these graphs show decreasing sales, remember that as a general rule, comic sales decrease in a gentle curve from month to month for every title everywhere. That's natural sales entropy, and it's why titles are constantly started over with number 1 issues; it moves the title back to the top of the ladder to start the slide over again.

Did Booster fail to make any mark on Smallville: Season 11's sales because Smallville takes place outside of continuity (whatever that word means in the New 52 Universe)? Was it because Smallville: Season 11 is sold in weekly installments online? Or was it because the people who would buy Smallville are buying anyway, and don't care who the guest star of the week is? Who knows. But whatever you do, don't blame it on Skeets!

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Last week, in regards to sales of Justice League of America, I said, "I suspect that since DC isn't crowing about how great [sales] have been, they can't find anything to crow about." Looks like I was very, very wrong.

According to Comichron.com, Justice League of America and its 53 covers was the best selling book for the month of February... since 1996!

Comichron goes on to note that this book even outsold Superman: The Wedding Album (November 1996), the previous best-seller since DC signed an exclusive distribution agreement with Diamond Comics Distributors in 1995. That's great news for Booster Gold fans, who saw their hero get his first in-continuity reference in months.

(Aside: For years, a good friend of mine who has owned a comic book store since the early 1990s had several unopened cartons of "white-bagged" Superman: The Wedding Album in his basement. It took him the better part of two decades to unload the unwanted issues that the hype following Death of Superman had lured him into over-ordering. I still tease him about that overly-ambitious order. Needless to say, his order for Justice League of America was much more conservative.)

While Justice League of America sold better than all comics in recent memory, there is ample evidence to suggest that fans were buying for the "53 covers!" gimmick, not the concept itself. Over at ComicBook.com, Russ Burlingame points out that Katana and Vibe, the tie-in series to JLoS, sold comparatively poorly at #80 and #78 respectively for the month. This a surprise, especially considering their pedigrees. Burlingame notes:

It's been a long time since [writer Geoff] Johns launched a title that debuted out of the top 50; back in 2007, Booster Gold came in at #58....

As we know, Booster Gold was cancelled after 4 years, but mainly because of Flashpoint. (Yes, sales were falling, but the title would indisputably have reached #50 if not for the Great Random Reboot of 2011.) What are the odds that Johns' latest series, Vibe, makes it even half that long?

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