Reprint Kings

There are 1,162,652 reprint links in this record, connecting 210,861 original issues to the places their contents turned up again. It is the largest single relationship in the database, and almost nobody looks at it.

They should, because a reprint graph is a record of commercial conviction. Nobody reprints a story out of sentiment. Somebody decided it would sell again, and then somebody decided that often enough to leave a trail you can count.

Counted by original issue, these are the most-reprinted comics in the record.

Issue	Year	Reprint links
The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1	1964	421
The Incredible Hulk #1	1962	374
Fantastic Four #1	1961	368
Action Comics #1	1938	274
Amazing Fantasy #15	1962	263
The Amazing Spider-Man #1	1963	262
Fantastic Four #4	1962	247
Fantastic Four #2	1962	246
Fantastic Four #5	1962	243
What If? #34	1982	240
Fantastic Four Annual #1	1963	239
Fantastic Four #3	1962	222

Four consecutive issues of one 1961 series are in the top twelve. Add the annuals and the Spider-Man debuts and the picture is unambiguous: the most-reprinted material in American comics is Marvel's output from a three-year window, 1961 to 1964, and nothing else is close.

Fantastic Four collections on eBay ›

Three things distort this graph, and a reader who does not know them will draw the wrong lesson from any version of this table, including the one above.

The same story is catalogued under several titles. Count by story rather than by issue and Journey into Mystery #83 splits into "The Stone Men from Saturn!" with 59 links and "Introducing... the Mighty Thor!" with 54. Same story, two records. Avengers #4 splits into "Captain America Lives Again!" and "Captain America Joins... The Avengers" at 62 apiece. Giant-Size X-Men #1 divides between "Deadly Genesis" and "Second Genesis." Amazing Fantasy #15 appears as both "Spider Man" and "Spider-Man!"

No story-level number is a true total. Aggregating by issue, as the board above does, collapses the duplicates and is the only honest way to rank this data.

Collections appear as origins. A 2004 history of pre-1945 comics ranks second in the raw board with 401 links, and a biblical adaptation and a Marmaduke paperback are not far behind. These are books that reprint other material, showing up as the thing being reprinted from.

The mechanism is the same one the context census documented: when the original printing is unindexed, usually because it was a newspaper strip, the earliest well-catalogued container inherits the record. The collection is not claiming to be the source. It is simply the oldest thing anyone has indexed properly.

Multi-feature issues accumulate links faster. A link is recorded per story, so an issue carrying ten short features that are each reprinted five times logs fifty links, the same as an issue with one story reprinted fifty times. Annuals and anthology issues are structurally advantaged in any count of this kind, which is worth remembering when an annual leads the board.

All three distortions are real and none of them touches the main finding, because early Marvel tops this board on single long stories in ordinary monthly issues. Fantastic Four #1 through #5 are not anthologies, not collections and not duplicates of each other. They are five consecutive comics that the industry has gone back to roughly 250 to 370 times each.

The reason is structural rather than sentimental. Those issues are the opening chapters of a continuous shared universe that has never stopped publishing, which means every subsequent decade has had a commercial reason to put them back in front of new readers: in annuals, in reprint titles, in Masterworks and Essentials, in omnibus editions, in digital collections, in bind-ups sold through bookstores rather than comic shops.

Action Comics #1 sits at 274 and is the oldest thing in the top tier, which is its own kind of achievement given that it predates the rest of the board by twenty-three years.

Spider-Man collections on eBay ›

Forget the top of the board for a moment and look at the shape of the whole thing. Of the 210,861 issues with any reprint link at all:

Times reprinted	Issues
once	60,751
2 to 5 times	88,448
6 to 20 times	53,001
21 or more	8,661

Four percent of reprinted issues account for the heavy end. The median reprinted comic gets reprinted a handful of times and then stops, which is what you would expect: a story is picked up for one collection, or recycled once into a reprint title, and that is the end of its second life.

The 8,661 issues at the top are a different category of object. Those are the comics that have been in print, in some form, more or less continuously, and the list of them is substantially the canon as the industry itself has voted on it with its printing budget.

Here is the practical consequence, and it is the opposite of what a price guide would tell you.

The most-reprinted comics in history are also the most expensive comics in history, and those two facts are related: the stories got reprinted because the characters mattered, and the characters mattered because the stories were good. But the reprinting means the reading is cheap. Every issue on that board has been collected many times over, and the content of a four-figure comic is available for the price of a paperback.

This site lists collected editions on issue pages for exactly that reason. Owning Fantastic Four #1 and reading Fantastic Four #1 are different purchases separated by several orders of magnitude, and the record can tell you where to find the cheap one.

Counts above were taken from the reprint graph on the day of writing, aggregated by original issue rather than by story to collapse duplicate title records. Links are counted as recorded, which means a story reprinted into a collection that is itself reprinted contributes more than one link.

Every issue named is on file here with its own page, and the collections that reprint it are listed there. If the graph shows a reprint that did not happen, or misses one that did, the corrections address in the footer reaches a person.