2024 In Comic Reading Habits

Let's talk about how I read comics last year and maybe I'll give you a little treat.

Happy New Year!

It’s been a busy few weeks for me, but I’m back to talk about my personal comic stats for 2023.

Paid folks, you can check out a little update on what I’ve been up to and a preview of few posts I have in the chamber at the tail end of this entry.

2023 Comic Stats

For the past few years, I’ve been tracking my comic reading habits in a near-religious way. Finish a comic? Add it to the spreadsheet. That’s been my mental mantra for years now.

I think it was at the start of 2017 when I decided I was done trying to keep track of all of the comics I was reading in my head and I started a spreadsheet on Google Docs: “Comics Read (2017).” So in 2018, I was in the fun position of having all this nice data for myself and I kept iterating on the template every year.

The tweet above is the first one I could find where I was posting stats on the internet, but I started keeping a record of things in 2017

Every year I add a thing or two to the template to make next years data collection easier or more discrete. Last year it was the inclusion of Zines as a comic type, the year before was adding overall page read counts per day in my “Aggregate Data” tab, this year... I’m not sure yet¹.

For now, I want to take the thread I posted earlier today and expand a bit on each chunk of data I summed up in just under whatever the Threads text limit is.

Comics Read By Type

This was my breakdown for 2023 by “type” of comics:

• 367 Single Issues

• 20 Comic collections

• 59 OGNs

• 36 Manga volumes

• 181 Manga chapters

• 2 Zines

Total Comics Read in 2023: 665

As I said in the thread, things are about even with last year’s data and that’s... fine? I did feel this entire year was slow on comic reading. I found myself not turning to comics in the evenings and instead preferring to watch YouTube videos, reading newsletters, or going on TikTok when I had free time.

I think part of that is in part due to some of the comics I had ready to read just not interesting me very much. I was deep into the Krakoan era of X-Men and half of those books felt like I needed a yarn board in my room to keep track of all of the plot lines because they were all so interwoven together².

And as I said, I’m hoping that in 2024 I do read more in general. I’d really like to try to tackle a few big read this year that have been on my forever list:

• Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing

• Naruto

• Blade of the Immortal (I’m on Volume 7)

• Godland

• Haikyuu!!

• Hellboy

• Copra

• Inuyashiki

• Promethea

• Rachel Rising

• Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Claymore (I’m about halfway through)

Everything here I already own (digitally) or I have access to via the Viz and Shonen Jump apps. I know I have others in my Amazon library from back in the day that I could get to.

And on top of all of this, I definitely have a few dozen comics at home I need to read on my shelves.

All this is to say: I know I have comics to read this year and I’m excited to dig into them, especially now that I cancelled all of my subscriptions on Amazon.

Comics Read By Publisher

Comics Read by Publisher (Google is not great about letting me organize these by size/type/whatever without me breaking my other spreadsheets)

I had a clear trio of publishers this year that I really focused on which isn’t surprising::

• Shonen Jump (149)

• Image Comics (139)

• Marvel (132)

The drop off from #3 to #4 in my spreadsheet is pretty significant: Viz with 47 (and some could argue that Viz and SJ are the same thing, but I separate them intentionally because they’re different ~vibes~). But yeah, I had a type this year. I get it. As I said, I like to binge read a few series on the SJ app and those books just keep a-comin’. Following just 5 books (One Piece, One Punch Man, Chainsaw Man, Kaiju No 8, and Dragon Ball Super), and digging into the first 20 chapters of Sakamoto Days explains all of this.

If I was really kooky, I could go back to my 2020 days where I read 1360 manga chapters in the year as I was doubling up with One Piece and Chainsaw Man that year, plus following a few other series. That was a wild one.

I think this breakdown also shows that this year I was really leaning into Image comics because while I was reading almost every X-Book out there, I still squeaked in more Image books³ especially looking at my pull list and collection purchases for the year.

Page Count vs. Date

This is sort of a weird graph because

1. I added a trend line and that’s just goofy

2. It only accounts for days where I read comics

So it’s not really helpful so much as it’s just kind of interesting to me. I do find it interesting to see little spikes of days like August 12th, 2023, where I read 1243 pages or November 10th, 2023, where I read 925 pages.

My guess would be that most of those spikes were Fridays or Saturdays because that seems to be when I get most of my “big” reading done these days--like big volumes or graphic novels. I’ll sit down on those days and read two or three 300+ page comics in a few hours and feel real good about it.

But beyond that graph, I do have some stats that are interesting:

• Number of days with reading: 158

• Average Number of Pages per day (on days when I read): ~203.55

• Average Number of Pages per day (for all days of the year): ~97.03

• Largest number of pages read in one day: 1282 (on Jan. 1, 2023)

• Total Pages Read for the year: 35,417

I do really like these numbers because under the surface they indicate a few trends:

If the “Average Number of Pages per day (on days when I read)” number is high, it means I was doing larger batches of reading at a time. And given that I only read on 158 days of the year, on average I was basically sitting down to read a medium sized collection / OGN every time I was reading.

But looking at the low number of “Average Number of Pages per day (for all days of the year)”, it puts that 158 in perspective. ~97 pages per day every day isn’t something to scoff at, but I’d like to think I could easily get away with reading ~150-200 per day.

Or maybe I’m just obsessing over numbers for no reason. Either way, I think a more healthy (and less stressful) approach to my comic reading for next year is to do it in smaller bouts and more often. A single issue / chapter or two, multiple days a week with a few collections or OGNs when I have the time might level these numbers for next year and remove the (completely self-added) pressure to binge and frustration when I don’t⁴.

Ratings for My Top Ten Most Read Publishers

And we’ll round things out with a bit of data I find a little funny: Ratings by Publisher.

This is completely unfair in my opinion because most publishers beyond the big 2 publish drastically varying genres and types of comics, so lumping them all together with the ratings I’ve given all of the books I’ve read by them is pretty unfair.

But I did it anyways.

So, sorted by the number of comics (in any form) that I read, here are the average ratings for top 10 publishers I read in 2023:

• Shonen Jump (149): 3.86

• Image (139): 4.09

• Marvel (132): 3.86

• Viz (47): 4.00

• DC (41): 4.07

• Dark Horse (23): 4.04

• BOOM! Studios (18): 3.72

• IDW (13): 3.69

• Abstract Studios (10): 4.50

• Fantagraphics (7): 3.57

Again, just looking at the number of comics I read here the dropoff from Marvel to Viz is wild, and then from DC to Dark Horse, etc.

Part of this is interesting because while just about two-thirds of my comic reading came from just three publishers, I did read 665 comics in total this year. Looking at the number of publishers I read from, I read at least one comic from 54 different publishers. So the last third of my comic reading was from 51 other publishers.

I don’t know what I’m getting to here, but it’s all pretty interesting information, to me at least.

To wrap this up (for the free folks), let me know if you have any suggestions for where I could crunch my reading data in the future. I’ve considered adding creator data (writer, artist, etc.) but that seems VERY tedious. But it could be something I tack on at the end of each month, who knows.