Sales Charts

Comics Experience owner Brian Hibbs has done his annual service to the industry byanalyzing the yearly graphic novels sales charts as reported to Bookscan. This is information people normally pay thousands of dollars for so it is technically leaked info, but while it's there let's take advantage of it. As Hibbs points out, these numbers do not reflect comics shops, indie bookstores, book fair or libraries, to name but four huge outlets for GN sales. So they are not complete. However they are a metric , and one that's worth studying.

Gaze upon my works, ye mighty...

Marvel continued its dominance of DC, although by a lesser margin than January, when DC's dollars/units were literally half of Marvel's. However Dark Knight...

by Carol Tilley The business of early comic book publishing in the US is something of a black box: too little data about actual practices,...

While researching the previous item, I cam across this every other month chart of graphic novel bestsellers in indie bookstores, via the ABA. It's about what you'd expect, with Raina Telegemeier and Allie Brosh, Noelle Stevenson, Kate Beaton and Saga reigning supreme. In other words, the unstoppable forces of mainstream comics acceptance. A little surprised that no Walking Dead on there, but the new season hadn't debuted when this chart was made.

SECRET WARS has finally ended...with a shocking sales twist!

Greetings, sales charts fans! It's time once again to look at DC's sales figures.

Things were bad for DC in January. How bad? With records going back to March 2003, DC had its second worst average sales on record of 21,845, just barely beating the March 2009 low point of 21,792. The Vertigo line had its lowest average sales on record by far: 6,832, beating the previous average low of 7,055 in March 2015. And the median sales for both lines was even lower: 24,624 & 5,802 respectively.

DC shipped twenty fewer comics in January as compared to December (74 versus 94). Two titles not shipping in January were two of DC's top sellers, Dark Knight III and Justice League. They moved a total estimated 1,616,524 comic units in January, compared to 2,640,519 in December, a difference of over a million units!

By Brian Hibbs (Originally published February 2016) "There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics” It’s Lucky Thirteen!  Yes, for the thirteenth year in...

A new year, a new Image of you.

Magic is the new trend at Marvel!

Federico Salvan of the Italian comics news site Manga Forever dropped me a line to alert me to a retailer survey on the state...

The top 300 comics charts are out for January, and John Jackson Miller has his monthly analysis which reveals that graphic novels were heavily...