Comics sales bounced back behind a five-week month, behind dark/black nights, reigns and, possibly, coffee, ICv2 reports:
Shades of black predominated in the top comic titles in July 2009, as three story arcs with noirish titles accounted for 14 of the top 25 comics, according to the rankings release today by Diamond Comic Distributors. DC’s Blackest Night was the strongest, with seven of the top 25 titles, but Marvel’s Dark Reign (3) and Dark Avengers/X-Men Utopia (4) storylines together accounted for another seven of the top 25.
MORE: July dollar trends
Top 300 Comics Actual–July 2009
Top 300 Graphic Novels Actual–July 2009
ALSO: John Jackson Miller stands at the ready, as ever.
Darker and blacker. Soon there will be only comic book pages filled with black panels and little word balloons,…floating around in them.
Hal Jordon: “Who’s there?”
John Stewart: “What,…where are you? Who said that?”
Wow, those issue-to-issue numbers for Wednesday comics are rough. That’s not a good trend at all.
Also, your link to the “Top 300 Comics” has an extra 3 in the article number.
-thanks
Wednesday Comics… $3.99 title… low production costs (cheap newsprint that is cheaper than the $2.50 Johnny DC comics, no binding, no slick cover, easy production design)… 64 page comic
By estimated gross (Est. Qty. x Price), all four issues are in the Top 50.
And for those keeping track, an estimated 6,914,718 comics sold for a total estimated gross of $24,194,895.99 . Avg. cover price = $3.499043054 Six titles above 100K.
June = $3.45882195 6,566,446 $22,712,167.56 2 titles above 100K
So more comics sold, at a higher average price (even with numerous DC $1 comics).
And Steve… your Darkest Night comic? Already been done, by Alan Moore (naturally) in “In the Blackest Night”. Given that Geoff Johns has used other Moore GL stories as inspiration, I would not be surprised AT ALL to see Rot Lop Fan playing a significant role in the current storyline.
Didn’t I hear Chiarello say at the Wednesday Comics panel at SD that newsprint was actually more expensive these days, due to its scarcity
“Take me out to the black…”
Oops, sorry. Wrong topic.
Saw some estimates on the number of units sold. It looks like Captain America: Reborn shipped 193k and Blackest Night 177k. Haven’t seen numbers like that in a while.
Has anyone else noticed that the MU 616 likes to latch on to a specific character and then use that character in every single book, changing it up every 12 to 18 months. About 6 years ago it was Nick Fury. Then Wolverine. Then Iron Man. Now Norman Osborn. I can’t wait for Marvel to end the cross-over madness and release the individual series again.
“I can’t wait for Marvel to end the cross-over madness and release the individual series again. ”
Micah made a funny.
@ Torsten Adair: I don’t doubt Wednesday Comics pulled in money (though with the premium talent attached, I’m unsure what the profit margin is), but shedding over 10K in the first four week is troubling. If the numbers continue to plummet, it could mean this is the last we’ll see of this experiment, which is too bad, because I’m digging it.