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by **LOLtron** » Tue Jul 17, 2012 10:58 am

Rob Liefeld Attacks Comics Beat's Math!

Rob Liefeld took umbrage to the website's reporting that Deathstroke's sales had gone up.

Source: The Comics Beat

While few comic book companies release actual sales figures with any regularity, a few sites make noble attempts to at least estimate monthly comic book sales.

One of these is Comics Beat, which runs a monthly feature charting DC's sales trends written by Marc Oliver-Frisch . The feature has often been used to cite the failure of Legion of Superheroes reboot as well as a guide to how well or poorly DC's New 52 Initiative has fared.

However, this week's installment came with a bit of controversy. Rob Liefeld, best known for his anatomically accurate rendering of feet and thumbs, attacked the website, claiming that it had inaccurately reported past sales on several titles in order to downplay the minor boost in sales that Deathstroke, Hawkman and Grifter had received when the Image founder had come on to write the title.

Oliver-Frisch explained that the additional sales were due to the titles' returnability over the past few months and that he, at Comichron.com founder John Jackson Miller's suggestion, had added 10% to the sales figures, which was supported by relatively static sales trends. However, Liefeld did not accept Oliver-Frisch's explanation and accused the writer of #liefeldbias, a dreaded accusation against journalistic integrity that rivals plagarism. The hashtag, of course, is a formal notification to the Twitter community that Oliver-Frisch suffers from a bias that invalidates his math and methodic tracking of comics sales trends.

What's interesting about this is that Liefeld seems to be bothered by either the fact that Comics Beat was trying to misrepresent the boost in sales that Liefeld's writing prowess brings to titles or that Liefeld simply has no clue about the actual sales figures himself. Considering that other writers have often decried sites' sales estimates as inaccurate due to them not factoring in subscriptions or international sales, it's telling that Liefeld simply doesn't just come out and say what sort of boost he gave to the sales.

Could it be possible that DC is withholding sales figures from Liefeld and other writers? Or is this simply a case of Liefeld standing up to what he perceives is another example of pesky internet journalists gunning for him? We'll let you decide.