Most popular female comic book characters to invest in
I stumbled an interesting view on why female first appearances can be the next big investing area. In particular, the following statement from a CGC board thread makes a lot of sense to me.
” Male readers have hundreds to thousands of male superheros to idolize and purchase their stories….But women do not. Female dollars chasing the universe of female characters vs. male dollars chasing the universe of male characters”
I looked up some stats and indeed, there is a growing trend of female comic readers. Facebook for example has done a study showing that out of 24 million comic book readers on Facebook, 46% is female!
More importantly, the major proportion of these female have spending power, as evident by their age groups as shown in the chart below.
This trend supports what I have quoted above about more female dollars chasing fewer female characters. This means there is a strong possibility of female first appearances increasing in prices. Currently, Harley Quinn is probably one of the most popular female characters but when every female collector has a Harley, who is next? To provide some insight into this question, I compiled the best selling female solo titles using June 2014’s sales data.
- Harley Quinn – 93,266
- Wonder Woman -48,235
- Batgirl – 47,304
- Ms Marvel – 33,795
- Catwoman – 33,694
- Batwoman – 33,538
- Black Widow – 25,423
- She Hulk – 24,736
- Captain Marvel – 24,062
- New Vampirella – 22,864
- Elektra – 22,773
- Supergirl – 22,481
- Buffy – 19,365
- Tomb Raider – 10,536
There are some REALLY interesting observations from the above.
- DC female characters are dominating the sales. No wonder Marvel is now busy playing catch up by launching numerous female solo books
- No surprise that Harley Quinn has the highest sales, which also explains the prices of her first appearance in Batman Adventures 12.
- Looking at the above, it seems Ms Marvel and Batwoman have the most affordable first appearance right now.
- I am surprised Ms Marvel is outselling Captain Marvel at the moment
What do you think? Which female characters are undervalued?