Last week I launched a regular report that will look at the demographics of comic book fans on Facebook.  This weekly column will now appear on Tuesdays to coincide with the #comicmarket discussion that occurs on Twitter (seems appropriate).  For this second entry, I’ve done two things, expanded the universe examined and also grabbed the data to compare how comic book fans compare with the Facebook community as a whole.

The Methodology

Questions on how I went about gather this data left a lot of people questioning the results from the inaugural entry.  That entry was rushed, I more wanted to prove it can be done, than really going all out.  The methodology is simple, Facebook allows individuals to identify their interests/likes.  In the inaugural entry, I used nine points of interests.

This second entry sees that expanded to 28.  I’m not going to list all of them, but they are general comic book companies/publishers/lines and what I’ll call the “medium,” so manga, comic books, graphic novels, etc.  I stayed away from individual books and personalities as well as related comic book tie-ins like movies, video games and toys.  What’ll you’ll see though is as the total number of identifiers tripled, the volume increase wasn’t that much.

These statistics are also for individuals on Facebook who are marked as living in the United States.

Total United States Comic Book Fan Facebook Population = over 1,760,380 – this is the total number of people who identified themselves through these 28 items.  There are a total of 160,549,620 Facebook users who are identified as living in the United States.  That means on Facebook a little over 1% of those located in the United States are comic book fans.

Men vs. Women

There was a flaw in my original graphic, those who are “unknown.”  These people have declined to give their data.  For purposes, I’ll now include that when applicable.  Here is the first major break from the general United States statistics.  In the general US statistics, women make up the majority with 51.06% versus men at 42.39%.  Comic book fans fall into the steroetype with men dominating almost 2 to 1 at 64.14% to women at 33.12%.

When breaking down education you also find that comic book fans are more educated than the general populace.

Age

The age breakdown of both comic book fans and Facebook has been greatly expanding.  Ages are now in a four year span.  Though the breakdown somewhat matches as far as the largest segments for each (18-21), that age group makes up 31.81% of the universe for comic book fans but 19.95% of Facebook users.  You’ll also notice at age 40, the number of comic book fans halves with each grouping, but there’s a more gradual decline in Facebook fans.  Almost 80% of comic book fans are under the age of 30 while just under 55% are in this age range for the general Facebook populace.

Relationship Status

By a slight majority comic book fans are “single” with 51.27% while only 33.24% of the Facebook population is.  The single population is overwhelmingly male (68.33%) while more even for the the general populace.  For comic book fans, this comes at the expense of the “married” status which is 17.77% for comic book fans and 39.4% for general Facebook users.

Gender Interest

There’s been some comments about what words I use for this statistic.  Facebook labels this as “interested in.”  To me this is different than orientation.  People can be “interested in” the same sex for friendship for example.  While this is an interested statistic, I don’t believe it necessarily denotes these users’ orientation.  As far as the overall percentages of what users are “interested in,” comic book fans have slightly higher percentages when it comes to same-sex.

With this data we now have a base for future comparison.  With Free Comic Book Day and numerous movies based on comic book franchises on the horizon, we’ll see if these numbers shift at all.

Up later this week is an international edition.