You once asked your followers what did we think Mtmte sale numbers were during publication, and I don't know if I missed a follow-up to that, but what were the actual numbers? How well was Mtmte selling?

AH, thank you for reminding me!! I absolutely meant to post my thoughts and just. Blanked on doing it. brain good tm

So the reason I had asked that is that there's a whole thing about how a lot of folks in this fandom are not like, Comic People TM generally, and perceptions of how comics sell outside the industry/fanbase versus how they actually sell is a big thing. And I had a sneaking suspicion that a) a lot of people in MTMTE/LL fandom think the comic was much more successful than it actually was relative to other comics, and b) that comics period are much bigger sellers than they actually are. (Comics here meaning monthly Western releases.)

And I was right! People gave BONKERS numbers. People said they thought it sold at least 100,000 issues a month on a regular basis. Some people said literally millions. Someone said it 'wasn't that successful' so probably 'only' sold around 75,000.

To give some perspective on those figures, 100,000 is a lot for the best selling comic issue in the entire world that month to sell. If Batman or whatever hits 100k that month, it's probably a big hyped issue or something! One of the things that always astonishes people is that the MCU being the biggest film franchise in the world for like a fucking decade now has in no way changed this. X-Men movies make hundreds of millions. This does not translate into the comics selling significantly more than they used to. (If you want to know more, I highly HIGHLY recommend these two essays by Colin Spacetwinks that go over the historical causes in astonishing detail.)

All that out of the way, let's talk what MTMTE did do numbers wise. In a word: not great, dropping to Very Not Great by the end of LL. Let's cut this, it's gonna get long I think.

MTMTE settled down after its launch at like, around 11-15k shifting per issue month to month. This is... well, for a non big two comic publisher (so, not DC or Marvel), this is kind of average? Not in the sense that this is middling performance, because that's really not great numbers, but in the sense that most comics are not financially succesful period. At DC or Marvel that would be cancellation numbers for a lot of titles. At IDW, it was... well. Average! (Contrary to popular belief, their TF titles were not their biggest seller/license. That was, at that time, MLP by a factor of 2:1. The FiM boom was real.)

This is around on par with exRiD as well, by the way. TF comics just... sold around that much. Steadily, without any great drop off in sales over time once settled, but never really getting more. And the thing IDW spent its whole damn time with the TF license doing was trying and failing to fix this. Every soft reboot, the 2019 reboot, all of it was related to them trying to find a way to bring on and keep new readers to bring the numbers up. And it never, ever worked.

Which sounds surprising, right? MTMTE did bring on new readers. Lots of them. Why didn't the sales figures go up? Well, I have a theory. Which is that the people it brought on were not people who were into other comics and gave TF a go, but instead people for whom TF was not just a first Transformers experience, but their first time with Western comics too. Which matters because comics are sold in a way that is fucking insane that means a lot of the ways people read comics Just Don't Count. And that was especially true back in 2012, when the digital comics industry was much less developed than today.

The reason being: only preorders of individual issues are 'counted' by comics publishers traditionally when tallying up how a comic is performing, really. If you walk into a comic book shop a week after it came out and buy it off the shelf? Does very little for the comic. If you buy it in trades? Nowadays this isn't quite so true as graphic novels have become a much larger part of the market, but traditionally, that really did not help a comic series avoid ongoing cancellation at all. You had to pre-order from a comics retailer, because that dictated how many issues they would pre-order in for future issues, and that was used to judge what series were doing well. Nobody explains this to the average consumer who just wants to read a neat comic. IDW did no work explaining this to new readers. You only know this if you are a Comics Person TM. And a bunch of teen and early 20s new-to-comics people who found and loved MTMTE through word of mouth did not know this, I think! WHY WOULD YOU. THIS IS A TERRIBLE BUSINESS MODEL. (again, there are historical reasons for it; the essays linked explain it.)

This is why Lost Light and Optimus Prime and Til All Are One got the relaunches. An old comics industry standby is to try (and fail) to artificially pump up numbers by relaunching as a new #1 issue and pretend it's a new series to try and attract new readers. That was all editorial fiddling to make the numbers go up. And it failed. Miserably. LL's sales figures infamously fucking tanked compared to MTMTE's early days. It ended at more like 5k a month, which is insta-cancellation levels even for smaller publishers tbqh. I mean that's dire. There were a lot of factors that were at play there. A full analysis is beyond me tbh!

When people say it 'made no sense' to reboot in 2019 and 'cancel their most succesful TF comic(s)' about MTMTE/LL etc, it's just important to know that numbers wise, that is not what happened. Every single IDW TF comic got to cancellation sales numbers and that's what the hard reboot of IDW2 basically was. LL especially was performing atrociously by the standards of its industry (and yes, the comics industry has ludicrous business practices and it's basically impossible to perform well under any circumstances, but that's not the main point here). The cancellation wasn't out of the blue and it wasn't IDW killing off a high performing comic arbitrarily. It cancelled every TF comic performing badly at once; that just happened to be. Like. Every TF comic at the time. And I assume they turned it into a hard reboot because that was like, the one thing they hadn't tried yet.

This got really long, oooops jskhdkjg but. Yeah. Basically, the perception in fandom is often VERY skewed versus what actually happened.