Sales Charts

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).

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.