Yesterday, I shared a letter from Roy Thomas printed in an ancient issue of Comic Fandom Monthly. Flipping through the pages of that 1972 fanzine, I came across a couple of charts—assembled by a young Paul Levitz, then the editor of his own fanzine, The Comic Reader—that deserve to have the dust blown off them and reexamined.

The charts Paul drew illustrated falling comics sales, reflecting numbers which indicate how bad things have gotten over the past few decades, in that the companies involved would likely be thrilled (correct me if I’m wrong) to sell today at levels which were once thought depressing.

Here are Marvel’s sales figures:

And here are DC’s:

What message did Paul draw from this?

He wrote that ” … comic books, per se, are dying, a fact which many fans can’t face. Sales have slumped steadily for the last couple of decades with the only upswing being during the camp era. That was of very short duration, anyway. The graphic story IS achieving acceptance, but the comic book is on its way out.”

There was an upside, though, wrote Paul:

“There is one cheery note in all this gloom. Comics are back to a battle of quality. Comics will no longer be sold on the basis of price but on the basis of their content.”

Of course, price meant something different then than it does now, since in the same essay he refers to the fact that “DC has switched to the 32-page, 20¢ format. Marvel, of course, has been at that size since September.”

So those good old days? They weren’t quite as good as you think they were.