Scans_Daily

Yeah, this was the Zenith of the X-Men. In the late 1970s, they were also-rans who had been out of circulation and were only bi-monthly. By the early 1980s, they were the New Hotness, heralding a new age of comics and changing the rules of what comics were doing (to a degree), by this time, they had risen to the point of being Marvel's biggest sellers: the only thing even close was Spiderman. The biggest issues of the year were either this, the debut of X-Force or the Spiderman issues where...Wolverine guest-starred. All in all, the X-titles were selling huge numbers at this time. A poor selling issue would only sell about 250-300,000 copies.

One of the things that Bendis was specifically brought on to do when he joined Marvel was to effectively bring the Avengers back to prominence, after the X-Men had knocked them out of years. Looking at January 1995, for example (the earliest year that Comichron has monthly data), Amazing X-Men #1 sells (at a guess) about 350,000 copies across Capital and Diamond combined, ranked at #1 for the month, followed by Astonishing X-Men and a bunch of other titles (the X-Men filling 8 of the top 10 positions). Avengers 384 sells...A LOT LESS. It's ranked 77 for the month, probably selling 50K...following months got worse, as it dropped to 30K. Keep in mind, this was during the boom of the 90s, so it was really bad.