Marvel Month-to-Month Sales: November 2011 – CORRECTED
With FEAR ITSELF wrapping up, Marvel had several major releases in November - the POINT ONE one-shot, the relaunches of UNCANNY X-MEN and FANTASTIC FOUR, and the first issue of new ongoing title AVENGING SPIDER-MAN. We've also got the epilogue of FEAR ITSELF, the start of BATTLE SCARS, and a bunch of other "Regenesis" tie-ins from the X-books. Marvel found itself behind DC for the third straight month in November, though the gap is growing closer. DC led by 40% to 38% in unit share, and 35% to 33% in dollars. And of course, it should be remembered that DC's extra sales don't appear to have come at Marvel's expense; if DC's relaunch has brought any new or lapsed readers into the market, then in theory, that's good for other publishers too - it brings them into everyone's potential market. Thanks as always to ICV2.com for permission to use these figures. 5. POINT ONE 11/11 One-shot - 113,352 Marvel's top selling comic of the month! Or is it? This book was massively overshipped, with retailers receiving twice the number of copies they'd actually ordered, at no extra cost. Those copies are presumably included in this number - that certainly appears to be Diamond's standard practice, given the odd sales spikes that we've seen when this strategy has been used before. If that's the case, then the actual orders of this book would be 56,676 - which would have placed the book at number 29 between AMAZING SPIDER-MAN and AVENGERS. Considering the solicitation ("You CANNOT miss this. Catch a tease of the biggest change to the Marvel Universe in over 35 years!") that number would surely have been disappointing, even allowing for the six dollar price tag. The wisdom of pricing a teaser book that high must also be open to question.
Continue ReadingDC Comics Month-to-Month Sales: September 2011
September was business as usual for DC Comics' periodical sales, as... oh, wait. The "New 52" project, a relaunch of its complete superhero line via 52 #1 issues, made September 2011 a record-breaking month for DC Comics -- and a joyously eventful one for the people watching their sales. It's not often that publishers attempt something on this scale, unfortunately, so it's nice not to come up with 52 different ways of expressing that sales have mostly been going down, for a change. It's a little bit like that myth about Eskimos and the words they have for snow. Anyway: The average DC comic book sold an estimated 57,224 units in September, the average DC Universe comic book a whopping 67,411 units. That's more than double what it was in August for both, as well as more than in any previous month since sole distributor Diamond started releasing information on actual sales to specialty retailers in March 2003. The month that comes closest is May 2006, when DC's line-wide "One Year Later" initiative kicked off, with 44,554 (DC total) and 59,505 (DC Universe) units, respectively. And, while we're breaking records: May 2006 was also the only previous time when the total dollar value of DC's periodical comic books exceeded 10 million, with an estimated $10,157,965. In September 2011, the amount was $10.9 million for DC total and $10.5 million for the DC Universe line, which never broke the 10-million mark on its own before. (Average cover prices were about the same, by the way: $3.05 for DC total and $3.04 for DC Universe in 2006, and vice versa in 2011.)
Continue ReadingDC Comics Month-to-Month Sales: August 2011
As you may have heard, DC had this relaunch thing going on in September, ending several months of deck-clearing and water-treading in the company's superhero line. The kick-off came in the last week of August, with the release of Geoff Johns and Jim Lee's Justice League #1, which -- to nobody's surprise -- leads the August charts by quite a margin. To gauge what this means in the broader context of the comic-book direct market, though, we'll have to go back a few years.
Continue ReadingToday is Torsten Day at Stately Beat Manor
While others celebrate Columbus, we will celebrate Torsten Adair, who's become our regular weekend poster, keeper of the Coming Attractions, and master of the roundup. Torsten has been commenting at the Beat as long as there's been a Beat, and somewhere back in the mists of the Mesozoic Era we said "Hey, if you're going to write all that you might as well post it."
Continue ReadingDC Comics Month-to-Month Sales: July 2011
Here's a number for you: Out of 65 DC Universe comic books published in July, 32 were by the writer/artist creative teams listed in the solicitations -- less than half of the bunch. Most of the others were either completely drawn by guest artists or had help from one or more of them. And for a couple, even the story credit changed. Not counting the six DC Retroactive books, the video-game adaptations and the New Wave titles, none of which are involved in the day-to-day of the DC Universe, the strike rate is 22 out of 55. So, presuming that's not a coincidence, it looks like the big DC relaunch was about 40% well-planned, at this juncture.
Continue ReadingDC Comics Month-to-Month Sales: June 2011
by Marc-Oliver Frisch The countdown to DC's big relaunch continued in June with a whole lot of Flashpoint tie-in books -- few of which seem to have stood out in any way to retailers, if the sales figures are any indication. Given that the upcoming relaunch titles are drawing on the same pool of creators, characters and concepts, that's not ideal for DC. If it's asking too much of readers and retailers to pick and choose among 16 titles of a certain mold, putting out 52 of them at once seems ill-advised. Over at the publisher's Vertigo imprint, meanwhile, almost half the current ongoing series are about to end within the next year. There's still plenty of time for Vertigo to announce replacements, certainly. But in combination with the recent WildStorm shutdown and the re-absorption of a number of key Vertigo properties into the DC Universe line, there seems to be a lot less patience than there used to be at DC for material that's not expected to immediately do well in the direct market.
Continue ReadingDC Comics Month-to-Month Sales: May 2011
Despite the debut of this year's big blockbuster series Flashpoint, average DC comic-book sales were down in May. In part, that's because Flashpoint itself came in 13,000 units below the magical 100K mark and ended up charting second after Marvel's Fear Itself #2, which has to be quite a disappointment for DC. On the other hand, most of the rest of DC's line didn't join in the crossover until June, so the overall numbers may still pick up. The other notable thing about DC's May output is that there wasn't a lot of it. The number of new comic books released by DC in May was 59, which, along with January 2004, holds the record for the fewest number of books released by the company since Diamond started publishing data on actual sales. Looking at the solicitations, it's not hard to find the reason: None of the five Green Lantern film tie-in books scheduled for May came out (one of them still hasn't been published as I'm writing this), while the launch dates of Static Shock and Batwoman were pushed back to September. And, while we're at it, the David Finch vehicle Batman: The Dark Knight remained in limbo in May. DC's Web site currently lists issue #3 for July 13 and issue #5 for August, with no information on #4. So not even DC seems entirely sure what's going on with the book.
Continue ReadingDC Comics Month-to-Month Sales: April 2011
DC's average comic-book sales continued to recover in April, for the third consecutive month, from January's all-time low. The publishing events "War of the Green Lanterns" and Action Comics #900 contributed their share to the good news, as did the absence of several low-selling cross-media adaptations inherited from the now defunct WildStorm imprint. More significantly, though, DC titles across the board continued their recent stabilization. Why are sales stabilizing? Well, let's speculate. Throughout 2010, the average cover price of a new DC comic book was $ 3.38, and there were an average 83 new DC comic books on sale per month. In the first four months of 2011, on the other hand, the average DC comic book cost $ 3.14, while the average number of titles per month was 71. That's not enough data to draw any sound conclusions, but it doesn't contradict the idea that retailers may be breathing a sigh of relief in the face of lower prices and volume, at least, and may be spending those extra 24 cents on a smaller number of titles as a result. Of course, all that could be moot in a few months, once the big, sweeping DC Universe relaunch comes around. But the other good news is, there were 54 new releases under the DC Universe imprint in April, with an average cover price of $ 3.23. So if those are replaced with 52 titles mostly priced at $ 2.99, then that should be a workable enough load for the market, in terms of sheer volume, if there's any truth to the above theory.
Continue ReadingFlipping Point: The Coin Is Scarred Side Up
While there will be plenty of PR spinning about DC's big news as a great jumping on point for new readers and all that other doublespeak, let's look at the other side of the coin.
Continue ReadingDC Comics Month-to-Month Sales: March 2011
Led by the top-selling Batman: The Dark Knight and Batman, Inc., which were back on the racks after a two-month absence, and a double-shipping Green Lantern, DC Comics' periodical sales continued a slow recovery in February. Notably, the February numbers also show modest increases across the rest of DC's line-up. Maybe the company's decision to cancel around 25% of its current ongoing titles and stick to a $ 2.99 price point is encouraging retailers, after all.
Continue ReadingDC Month-to-Month Sales: February 2011
by Marc-Oliver Frisch-- Unit and dollar sales of DC Comics' periodical business remained at the lower end of the spectrum in February, despite a slight recovery from January's all-time low in average unit sales. However, the direct market as a whole has seen better days, and so DC still managed to snatch the three top spots of the chart and six out of the Top 10 in February, regardless of the company's lackluster sales. For the publisher's mainstream DC Universe line, the absence of major titles Batman Incorporated and Batman: The Dark Knight continued to be a problem, while the hangover from the discontinued WildStorm imprint kept dragging down the average. Average comic-book sales of DC's Vertigo imprint were still hovering above the 10k mark, meanwhile. See below for the details, and please consider the small print at the end of the column. Thanks to Milton Griepp and ICv2.com for the permission to use their figures. An overview of ICv2.com's estimates can be found here.
Continue ReadingDC Comics Month-to-Month Sales: January 2011
DC kicks off the year with a new sales record: Average numbers of the DC Universe line dropped by 21% in January, to 24,321 -- the lowest number in the history of these charts, by about 4,000 units. Traditionally a weak month in the comic-book market, January 2011 was even more of a downer than usual for DC. With only five titles selling above the 50k mark, average comic-book sales of the company at large fell to 21,922, the lowest figure since March 2009, while average Vertigo sales clung to the 10,000-unit mark, as they've done for the last three years. The poor January performance of the DC Universe line comes thanks to three different kinds of erosion. First up, DC failed to get Green Lantern, Batman Incorporated and The Flash out of the door, three of its major titles, while a fourth one, Batman: The Dark Knight, was still late from December. Second, DC is looking at a whole range of failing titles: Out of the 43 ongoing monthly DC Universe series currently on sale, eight have been marked for cancellation and won't be around come June 2011. That's almost 20% of the imprint's regular output. And there are eight more -- Doc Savage, The Spirit, T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, Jonah Hex, Booster Gold, Power Girl, Zatanna and Gotham City Sirens -- that look less than healthy and sell fewer copies than some of the ones that have already been axed. At the tail end of the spectrum, finally, six former WildStorm titles were absorbed into the DC Universe line in January, where they end up being the six lowest-selling books and dragging down the average. (If WildStorm were still around, this would be another new low for them: The six books, one of which missed the charts altogether, have average sales of less than 4,000 units.) So, for better or ill, 2011 is set to be a year of transition for DC, with some heavy lifting in the company's periodical line. See below for the details, and please consider the small print at the end of the column. Thanks to Milton Griepp and ICv2.com for the permission to use their figures. An overview of ICv2.com's estimates can be found here.
Continue ReadingJust Mostly Gross, Funny Fun: An Interview with CHEW Writer John Layman
On the occasion of the German edition of Chew, which recently debuted from Cross Cult Verlag, I had the opportunity to talk to Layman about the series, his prospects in the comics industry and his experiences at WildStorm. An abbreviated and translated version of the interview, which was conducted via e-mail over the course of several weeks, appears in Chew – Bulle mit Biss 1: Leichenschmaus. The book can be purchased here, here or here, among other places. (Disclosure: I’m the translator.)
Continue ReadingDC Comics Month-to-Month Sales: December 2010
by Marc-Oliver Frisch On the surface, December 2010 was a great month for DC Comics. The company had a bigger share of the market than its main competitor Marvel, if only in terms of dollar value, and took all of the Top 5 spots on the chart, as well as a total 8 out of the Top 10. That doesn't happen a lot. Upon closer inspection, though, a less rosy picture emerges: DC's average comic-book sales in the direct market were slightly down from November, average dollar and unit sales were only slightly up. So, despite big releases like the debut of writer/artist David Finch's Batman: The Dark Knight and, over in the "Graphic Novel" section, J. Michael Straczynski's Superman: Earth One book, it turns out December was more or less business as usual, from a commercial vantage point. Meanwhile, DC's WildStorm imprint, which the company bought from Jim Lee in 1998 and then proceeded to slowly but determinedly squeeze the life out of, ceased publication in December. Average WildStorm sales sagged below the 5K mark, to the lowest number in history.
Continue ReadingDC Comics Month-to-Month Sales: November 2010
by Marc-Oliver Frisch On the surface, November was business as usual for DC, with "Brightest Day" and the latest makeover of the Batman line cheerfully purring along. Apart from a handful of strong major books, though, many DC titles displayed sudden, unusually large drops. See below for the details, and please consider the small print at the end of the column. Thanks to Milton Griepp and ICv2.com for the permission to use their figures. An overview of ICv2.com's estimates can be found here.
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