Sales Charts

DC scored with Convergence and Marvel scored with Star Wars in the April sales figures just released by Diamond Comic Distributors. Star Wars #4 was the biggest comic of the month, but all five of DC's nü-DC kicking off Convergence mini made the top 10. This led the way to DC's best performance in a while, but they still trailed Marvel in both dollars and units. April was a five Wednesday month so direct comparisons were not useful, however comics remain up in double digits for the year, up 12% in dollars and, perhaps more significantly, 14.47% in units.

by David Carter Greetings, sales charts fans! It's time once again to look at DC's sales figures. March 2015 was not a good sales month for DC in the North American direct market. Average sales per title for the DCU books (28,559), Vertigo (7,055), and DC as a whole (23,466) were all the lowest they've been since the New 52 started back in September 2011. Most of their sales problems were due to books that missed shipping in March, including their two top sellers, Batman and Justice League, and two other books that are in their top 30% (or so), Wonder Woman and Superman/Wonder Woman. A similar tune plays at the Vertigo label; with Sandman Overture MIA until May, the perpetually delayed American Vampire Second Cycle also not around, and Fables pretty much over (except for the oversized finale coming in July). That leaves Astro City as the regularly-shipping standard bearer for the imprint.

Marvel's Princess Leia #1 was the #1 book in March according to Diamond's just released sales charts....another month for a female led title to top the charts following Spider-Gwen last month. Howard the Duck #1 also made the top ten, a pretty strong debut. And yes, I know the Marvel Star Wars franchise is so strong (esp. with variant covers) that they could put out a Nien Nunb #1 and it would probably top the charts, but Spider-Gwen and Ms Marvel also made strong showings elsewhere so this is not a fluke.

Welcome to a new analysis of the Marvel sales. Reminder: I'm the French guy who took over Jason for this column. Less figures, a comparaison with the issue#2 sales and some TPB sales at the end are the only big differences you could notice. Reminder: those sales are estimates, sales to comics shops 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. It's a little hard to be sure what the fate of each title will be after Secret wars: Marvel did release a list of the titles that will come back after the event, and confirmed that The Last Days banner was for titles that will stop publication. But, frankly, it's hard to believe the list, and seeing that a title can be cancelled to be relaunched one month later with no differences, the word “cancellation” can lose some of its meaning. I'm pretty sure they will change their mind on the way and that, in fact, they are not sure yet which titles will come back, waiting for how many copies those Battleword titles will sell before taking their real decisions.

reetings, sales charts fans! It's time once again to look at DC's sales figures. While DC's top seller, Batman, slid to #5 on the Diamond chart--behind the debut issues of Orphan Black (Loot Crate-enhanced), Darth Vader, and Spider-Gwen; and the second issue of Star Wars--things were in fact a bit rosier for DC in February. Especially compared to January, as the Harley Quinn freely-orderable variant was a good deal more popular with those doing the ordering than last month's Flash variant. In most cases adding 2K - 4K more copies for those titles with the HQ variant. (A couple, Batman & Flash, went up about 8K; while Batgirl mysteriously dropped instead.) For the most part, DC is in a holding pattern right now, as many titles are coming to a close next month and the move-induced mega-event Convergence on the slate for April & May followed by a sizable relaunch in June. So you'll have to forgive the brevity of many of the comments below, as their just isn't that much to say this month that hasn't already been said before. Don't worry, I promise that the next few month's DC sales charts will have plenty more excitement!

By Kate Reynolds If December was a rough month for comics, January gives us glimpses of several titles that haven’t been on the chart for quite some time. Titles like Purgatori from Dynamite Entertainment, Borderlands Fall of Fyrestone from IDW, and Zero from Image made reappearances that let us know how these series were doing. This month 142 independent titles hit the top 300 list, which is up from last month’s total of 133. Even with the addition of nine titles to the list, sales were down 7.6% compared to last month’s 1,506,427. That brings the average number of comics sold to 9,867, which is also down from last month. There’s plenty of room for these numbers to grow in the year 2015.

Fusion's Danielle Henderson runs some numbers and shows that New feminist Thor is totally outselling old Thor. Of course, we know all about first issue bump, standard attrition and all that, but obviously the book launched with a high degree of interest.

by Xavier Lancel  Welcome to my first analysis of the Marvel sales. If you think I have a weird way to express myself, that's because...

What th--!!?? IDW's Orphan Black #1, following the mysteries of a cloned woman, was the #1 comic of February, according to the figures released today by Diamond. While details of the crate haven't been released yet, its suspected that the comic is part of the March Loot Crate offering. With 350,000 subscribers (and growing) this has become something of a cottage industry for comics like Rocket Raccoon #1 and Star Wars #1.

Greetings, sales charts fans! It's time once again to look at DC's sales figures. This month, nearly all of the comics with freely-orderable variants (Flash 75th anniversary) saw a drop of 3-4K. We've seen drops on these in the past months, but they were so uniform this month that I thought that maybe something else was going on. But the more I looked at it, I became convinced that it was the case the retailers as a whole just dropped their orders on these.

Brian Hibbs has posted his annual Bookscan analysis—charting actual sales of books that report to Nielsen’s Bookscan sales charts. while Bookscan numbers are not...

December felt like a rough month for comics, with seven titles seeing a drop of over 40% of their readers. The month wasn't all bad, however, as it also saw the release of Bitch Planet from Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro. It had the highest release of December, followed by Rumble (Image), Hellboy and the BRPD (Dark Horse), and The Valiant (Valiant Entertainment).