Sales Charts

By David Carter Greetings, sales charts fans! It's time once again to look at DC's sales figures. With Convergence now in the rearview mirror, the DCU...

by Xavier Lancel

Welcome to a new analysis of the Marvel sales. Reminder: I'm French, that's why I'm talking funny. Please address your complaints to my over-drugged cyclists country.
Reminder: those sales are estimates, sales to comics shops located in North America. American comics do get sold somewhere else in their original floppy edition. Keep also in mind that just because a copy is sold to a shop doesn't mean it's sold to a customer. This would be way too easy. Digital sales are not taken into account.

This month, a horde of mini-series (or ongoing, who knows, Marvel hasn't been very clear on that) is invading the Marvel chart. Only one thing is sure: everything will be relaunched (or should I say renumbered) past Secret Wars (SW). The Last Days banner, supposed to frighten customers ("Oh, look, that's his last adventure in the old MU! "), is working like a charm for titles who were struggling to stay alive.

As always, tons of Star Wars franchise comics are sold, reordered, repackaged. The $5 price tag is less predominant this month but the test worked: customers are ready to pay $5 for, not caviar in a nice box, but paté wrapped in journal paper: you'll have to do your own cover, cut the ads and add the still missing 2 pages that were lost "to keep the prices low "...

You know, maybe the narrative about Dark Horse losing the Star Wars license to Marvel wasn't DH's loss but Marvel's gain: sales of Star Wars...

Welcome to yet another Marvel Sales Analysis. Reminder: I'm French, so that's why I'm talking funny. Please address your complaints to my let's-scare-Courtney-Love-with-our-mean-taxi-drivers country. However, one thing seems sure: following the conclusion of Secret Wars, all titles will be renumbered at #1—even titles that didn’t reach double-digit issue numbers. This includes books like Hawkeye, Howard the Duck and the armada of female spider characters.

Once again, The Beat is looking for a sales chart analyst to take over the monthly Indie Sales charts. Kate Reynolds has done yeoman service but she's moving on to other frontiers and vistas. (Including hopefully some more writing for The Beat.)

As we all know, Hajime Isayama's Attack on Titan has been the shock trooper in the recent manga bounce back here in the US...

As you may know, I keep a little feed of Amazon's best selling graphic novels in my desktop, just to see what's charting. It's usually the same seven or eight books—Klling Joke, Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Saga, Fun Home, Persepolis and so on. But this week, along with a strong week for anything by Scott Snyder about Batman, there is a new #1 book, and it comes with a whiff of the new: Fart Wars by J.B. O'Neil. O'Neil who has self published this and several other volumes in The Disgusting Adventures of Milo Snotrocket series, has found a formula so profound it's truly astonishing no one came up with it before: mix one part Star Wars parody, one part Wimpy Kid simple drawing, and 20 parts fart humor and you have something that is smelling, er, selling briskly in the Kindle format.

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

After last month's large (with an asterisk) sales in the first month of Convergence, things calm down somewhat in May. Nothing that wasn't expected as the second half of the weekly and the second issues were bound to sell less than the first, and the drop-offs were fully within expectations.

Marvel's Secret Wars crushed it for periodical, while Images graphic novels crushed it in June sales just released by Diamond. Secret Wars #3 was the top over all comic, and Marvel had 7 or the top 10 slots and held a commanding 15% lead over DC in both units and dollars. DC You seems to have yet to find its footing. The other stat that jumped out at us: GN's were wayyyyyy up for the month -- like 31.35% up. Image was the reason and normally you see this kind of leap when a new Walking Dead comics out, but this time it was Wytches by Scott Snyder and Jock, along with a strong debut for Fraction and Ward's ODY-c—and perhaps more interestingly, a month of Marvel titles, including perennial Civil War and a new Thanos GN by Jim Starlin. Could Marvel actually be shoring up their backlist?

For the second year, ICv2's Milton Griepp and Comichron's John Jackson Miller have released a joint report on comics sales in the previous year, and they report that the state of the union is good, with graphic novel sales hitting a 20 year high. Sales are up in all channels except newsstand sales, where Marvel jumped ship and DC may have as well. SO STOP TELLING US TO GO BACK TO NEWSSTANDS, OKAY? Comics are doing just fine without "newsstands."

Note: The distribution numbers used below are estimates, not hard sales numbers.  They're accurate to the trends, but take the exact unit measurements with...

By John Jackson Miller -- Marvel's Secret Wars revival made a big splash in the comics market in May, moving more than 527,000 copies to comic shops in North America. That's according to Comichron's estimates for May 2015 comics sales based on information released by Diamond Comic Distributors. You can find the report here. That's enough to place the issue fourth on the list of best-selling comics of the century, and it could go higher with reorders. It came in a month when strong six-figure launches from A-Force and Old Man Logan, and a dominating performance from Batman: Earth 2 Vol. 2 on the graphic novel charts helped push the market to a 13% increase.