Spider-man may be able to stick to walls but his sales figures are sliding as Batman becomes the US's top super hero, according to estimates based on distributor data.
Comics featuring the web-slinging superhero as a titular character have reached the top 300 monthly sales charts in the US just under 1,500 times over the past decade. These charting titles have led to estimated sales of 49m and a gross of over $140m - making him the top grossing superhero for comic books sales over the past decade.
However, despite coming out on top overall, Spidey's sales have begun to wane. Since 2010 comics featuring Batman in the title have sold more than those featuring Spider-man. 2012 saw 4.5m charting Batman comics being sold compared to 3.2m Spider-man comics. This represents a fall for Spidey from a height of 5.7m in 2002 - the year that the first Spider-man movie featuring Tobey Maguire was released - compared to 2.2m Batman comics. Batman and Spider-man still fall behind the X-Men when it comes to overall sales but this is partially down to the large number of titles released under that banner. Charting X-Men comics sold just under 65m copies, grossing almost $200m between 2002 and 2012. Female superheroes did not fare so well either with Wonder Woman being the only one whose sales were comparable with her Justice League teammates Superman, Batman, Green Lantern and the Flash. The data is drawn from comic book artist John Jackson Miller's estimates of overall sales based on Diamond Comic Distributors deliveries to comic book stores, so it does not include subscribers.

We used only the top 300 for each month so superheroes may have made extra sales that did not chart. It is also worth bearing in mind, that printing plays a role; there are, for example, far more Spider-man comics produced than Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics.

The interactive graphic below allows shows how the charting sales have changed from 2002 to 2012. It also allows users to select superheroes who are in the list to see what movies were released and compare those against sales figures.

What good movies do to comic book sales

The release of big blockbuster movie adaptations appears to have a significant effect on comic book sales. For example the release of the Avengers Assemble movie in 2012 preceded a huge spike in sales of Avengers comic books. In the same year there were over 7m Avengers comics sold, a rise of 3m from 2011, which made it a close second to the X-Men for overall sales.
Ryan Jenkyns, a comic book artist who works at London's Orbital Comics, said: "There's a definite correlation in terms of what comics in terms of what selling out of when a film terms out. For example, when Avengers came out recently we sold out of basically anything with Thanos in based on a 30-second clip at the end of the credits.

We have an event shelf at the shop. Over the last ten years when a film based on a comic comes out, everyone who has seen it wants to collect merchandise from it. When a Spider-man film comes out we put all our Spider-man comics on that shelf with anything else they put out. We find that we're often having to restock that self.

And who is buying these comic books? This data shows individual sales rather than subscriptions, so a large amount of the increase will be from people who are not regularly buying the series beforehand. Ryan has some insight from the UK market:

There's a mix actually. There's hardcore fans trying to get into a series they may not have been into before. And there's people who are completely new to comics, who want to see the source material and where that came from. Particularly in 2008 when the Dark Knight came out, we were selling comics featuring the Joker (Batman's antagonist in the movie) everywhere.

What bad movies do to comic book sales

But the effect seems to be limited. If the movie is bad - and there have been some shocking superhero films - then the hero does not seem to receive much of a boost afterwards, even if a sequel is coming out.
The Fantastic Four film received just 40/100 on reviews aggregator Metacritic and the quartet did not receive much of a sales spike following their almost-as-badly-received sequel The Rise of the Silver Surfer.
The Hulk, Superman, Wolverine and Spider-man have all suffered from the same fate with their more poorly reviewed movies not really exciting fans to the store after the event. Continuously strongly received sequels such as X2: X-Men United and the Batman series actually correlated with increased sales over time.
So Spider-man 3, which critics were lukewarm towards, may be partially to blame for the webbed wonder's slight downturn in sales. Even Andrew Garfield's new version of the hero, featured in The Amazing Spider-Man last year, was not able to swing to the rescue.

Can you do more with this data?

• Contact us at data@guardian.co.uk

• Follow us on Twitter
• Like us on Facebook