Tomb Raider · Top Cow Productions · From 1999 · 50 issues
The best-selling single comic book of 1999 was a Lara Croft tie-in — written by the man who had killed Superman, and launched with four variant covers.
Top Cow launched its Tomb Raider series in December 1999, at the absolute peak of Lara Croft's cultural ubiquity, and the debut issue became the number one selling comic book of that year. The writer was Dan Jurgens, best known for The Death of Superman — a genuinely heavyweight mainstream credit — with art by Andy Park and inks by Jon Sibal. The launch was engineered for the speculator market with the full apparatus of late-1990s comics retailing: three regular covers by Marc Silvestri, David Finch and Andy Park in equal proportion, plus a fourth holofoil cover awarded to retailers for every twenty-five copies ordered. The series ran to fifty issues between 1999 and 2005 and drew a substantial roster of talent over its life — writers Dan Jurgens, John Ney Rieber and James Bonny, and artists including Michael Turner, Billy Tan and Adam Hughes alongside Park. It is one of the very few video game comics of the era to sustain a long, commercially successful run at a major independent publisher rather than being a short promotional adjunct to a game release.
The best-selling comic of 1999, and proof a game licence could headline the direct market
Video game comics of the 1990s were, almost without exception, marketing. They were short, cheaply produced, aimed at children, and understood by everyone involved to be an extension of a games campaign rather than a comic in their own right. Tomb Raider was the exception, and the reason is entirely to do with timing: in 1999 Lara Croft was not a video game character so much as a mainstream celebrity, appearing on magazine covers and in advertising for products with no connection to games at all.
Top Cow treated the licence accordingly. Hiring the writer of The Death of Superman is not what a publisher does with a throwaway tie-in, and neither is commissioning four covers from marquee artists. The comic was positioned as a flagship direct-market book that happened to star a game character, and the market responded by making it the year's biggest seller.
The launch is also a perfect specimen of late-1990s comics retailing, a period in which publishers had learned to manufacture demand through scarcity. Three covers in equal proportion means a completist has to buy three copies. A fourth cover, in holofoil, available only to retailers who order twenty-five, means shops order more than they can sell in order to obtain the incentive — inflating the print run and the sales figures simultaneously.
That the debut issue topped 1999's sales charts is therefore a fact that requires an asterisk, and the asterisk is instructive. Comics of this era were sold to speculators as much as to readers, and Tomb Raider's numbers reflect both a genuine cultural moment and a distribution apparatus purpose-built to exaggerate one. The fifty-issue run that followed is the better evidence: the book kept selling long after the variant-cover trick stopped working.