How valid is the information in comic book Statements of Ownership?
Validity differs from reliability in that it answers the question, “is this statistic really reporting what it says it is?” And whether Statements are telling the real sales truth has been a subject of debate for many years, since fans started collecting them in the 1960s as a means of figuring out which comics were selling the best. It’s a federal crime to falsify the numbers — so, in theory, you might expect the information to be accurate. But there have been cases where negligence or misunderstanding led to errors in the Statements — and there have been many occasions where computational errors have crept in. (Easily rectified errors have been corrected for the Comics Chronicles reports.) While there have been suspicions from time to time of publishers fiddling with their Statements to improve their numbers, little evidence of this has been found — especially as other sources of comics circulation figures have become available for comparison. Gross exaggeration would have to be done
