Sales Charts

Welcome to my 12th and final month as your guide through Marvel’s sales numbers. Due to some career changes and advancements that my family and I have made, I can no longer write these articles. It has been fun and a great learning experience, and I thank you for joining me. But enough about me, let’s look at the monthly breakdown.

Greetings, sales charts fans! It's time once again to look at DC's sales figures. December was a good news/bad news month for DC. The good news is that they had the #1 comic for December (Batman) and they won the unit market share, based mostly on the fact that they pushed out a ton of product. (December was a five week month but most other publishers treated it like a four week month.) The bad news is that sales were down month-to-month across most of the DCU titles, both as a line average and on most of the individual titles as well. (The release of an issue of Sandman Overture kept the average of DC as a whole from going down.) Looking at all of this month's numbers after last month's lends some credence to there having been some sort of small LEGO cover boost in November that is being corrected for in December's numbers. Which seeing as (imho) the December Darwyn Cooke covers were much more interesting than the LEGO covers is a bit disappointing. But hey, LEGO is a known quantity to people outside of the comics club and retailers may have been banking on a few extra sales of the LEGO covers outside of their regular clientele. Or maybe I'm just imagining things in the data that aren't really there.

  By Brian Hibbs (Originally published February 2015) “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics” For the twelfth (!) year in a row, I’m...

Diamond just released its January figures and Marvel had a pretty thorough market share dominance,  41.05% dollar share and a 45.64% unit share to DC's...

[David Carter is the author of our monthly DC sales charts but he also hosts his own site, Yet Another Comics Blog, where he catalogs Amazon's graphic novel sales each week. Although these are a rolling average, They do provide some clues to what were the best selling books of the year. Take it away, David!]

Comixology's Submit portal is a way for independent and self published digital comics to get onto the largest digital comics service out there, and many people have taken advantage of it. While no one seems to have gotten rich off it, a sale is a sale. And COmixology has just released a list of the top 25 sellers for 2014, topped by Gail Simone and Jim Calafiore's Leaving Megalopolis. This superheroes with a twist story was originally Kickstarted. The impressive Testament Omnibus by Douglas Rushkoff and a bunch of awesome artists was second, and Joe Benitez's Lady Mechanika was #3. Severl anthologies Kickstarted by the tireless C. Spike Trotman were also on the list...she is a powerhouse.

Graphic novels were one of only two print fiction categories whose sales were up in 2014 (westerns were the other), according to Publishers Weekly's Jim Milliot in a piece called The Hot and Cold Categories of 2014. GNs were up 13% according to Bookscan. The article also includes a chart of all categories, and reveals that 8,669,000 graphic novels were sold in 2014, up from 7,659,000 in 2015. For comparison, 33,524,000 general fiction books were sold in 2014.

By Kate Reynolds November saw a slew of new titles from Image with some pretty serious sales, most notably ODY-C from Matt Fraction and Tooth...

BY JOHN JACKSON MILLER [Reprinted with permission from Comichron] With today's release of December comics orders from Diamond Comic Distributors — and our subsequent analysis and estimates for December 2014 comics sales now posted — Comichron has drawn upon that information to project estimates for the Top Thousand Comics and the Top Thousand Graphic Novels for 2014. Click to see them. 201404AmazingSpiderManV3n1The tables are on the page just beneath the image links to individual months. As in past years, it is a large page, necessarily, so it may take a bit to load. Also as in the past, I have rounded off estimates to the nearest hundred comics. Before launching into a discussion of what's on the list, some more general thoughts on 2014, now that we've seen all the data:

Yawn. Batman and Saga led the comics and graphic nvoels charts for Decembers 2014, as they so often do, according to just released stats...

With sales of more than a million copies and the number of confirmed variant covers at 89, Marvel's first Star Wars #1 in nearly 40...

Diamond released a bunch of year end charts yesterday including the top 1000 comics and GNs. I may load those up at some point but...