DC Comics Month-to Month Sales: February 2015 – Batman is an Orphan Too…
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!
Indie Month-to-Month Sales January 2015: Return of Comics Past
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.
Chart: Lady Thor outsells Male thor
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.
Marvel Month-to-Month Sales January 2015: From Star Wars to Secret Wars
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...
Sales Charts: IDW’s Orphan Black #1 is best selling title for February
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.
DC Comics Month-to Month Sales: January 2015 – Flash Drop
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.
Women and children conquered The Walking Dead in 2014 graphic novel sales
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...
Indie Month-to-Month Sales December 2014: It’s a Bitch Planet type month
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).
Marvel Month to Month Sales Charts December 2014: Time is Running Out for Marvel
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.
DC Comics Month-to Month Sales: December 2014 – A Darwyn Cooke Overture
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.
Tilting at Windmills #240: Looking at BookScan: 2014
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...
Star Wars #1 leads Marvel to a commanding market share in January
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...



















