Sales Charts

Greetings, sales charts fans! It's time once again to look at DC's sales figures. Sales were down in November for DC as compared to October. Though October was a five-week month and more books naturally shipped that month, the average sales for DC as a whole and in each product category were down in November as well. But nothing to be too concerned about, as sales in the second two-thirds of 2014 are up roughly 10% as compared to the first third of 2014. Credit both the weekly Batman Eternal and the freely-orderable variant program for that increase. Speaking of variant's, this month's was LEGO. It's hard to see the month-to-month effects of the different variants and they're now being somewhat subsumed by other effects like attrition, crossovers, creative changes, etc. But there were a few titles with LEGO variants that saw a slight increase in sales for no other apparent reason which may be an indicate that retailers ordered the LEGO covers at a slightly higher level than they did last month's Monsters variants (all other things being equal). Anecdotal evidence from some retailers (e.g. Mike Sterling of Sterling City Comics) points to a definite in-store attraction to these LEGO covers, and suggests that perhaps DC is leaving money on the table by not producing a comic based on the wildly popular LEGO Batman video games. (Though perhaps licensing issues are prohibitive)

Amazing Spider-Man #1 was the top selling comics of 2014, and Marvel the #1 publisher according to charts just released by Diamond Comics. And...

Wow! So that is a lot of AXIS, Spider-Verse, and Death of Wolverine coming out this month. Spider-Verse topped the charts this month, with Axis and some new debuts close behind, but I can’t help but wonder if these events are starting to cannibalize each other’s sales a bit. AXIS seems to be underperforming a bit, and I wonder if people are just getting tired of event after event.

Ah... another year draws to a close, and just like the Facebook New Years app, I analyze a year's worth of data, run my...

Marvel continued to dominate the top 10 and both units and dollars according to November sales figures released today by Diamond. Sales for the...

Marvel's svp of sales David Gabriel has  confirmed that STAR WARS #1 will sell 1 million copies.  And already my inbox is jammed with missives...

Over the holiday I spotted something pretty eye-popping on Tumblr—this comics sales chart from Amazing Heroes #49, published in 1984 and posted by Sam Humphries. Your jaw will drop in amazement to see a world where American Flagg!, a daring SF comic by Howard Chaykin outsold Captain America, and Groo outsold Batman, Detective and Green Lantern.

Greetings, sales charts fans! It's time once again to look at DC's sales figures. After last month's Futures End 3D cover extravataganza, things return to normal in October. DC continued their freely-orderable variant cover program, with the theme this month being Monster covers. The comics with variant covers are still selling higher than they would have without them, but at this point the month-to-month effects are largely subsumed by regular considerations such as creative team changes, crossovers, and standard attrition. October saw the debuts of several DCU titles, to varying effectiveness. Deathstroke by Tony Daniel and several Batman-related titles did relatively well, while a couple of supernatural-theme books (Trinity of Sin and Klarion) did less so. October was also the debut of the highly-touted revamped Batgirl, which saw the comic jump up to a top-twenty title. DC's third weekly title, Earth 2: World's End, debuted in October. Here are the first month sales of all three weekly series (plus the most recent issue for BE & FE):

BY JASON ENRIGHT — Hello Sales Chart Analyzers! In October, there were a lot of books. So to start, let’s break down the numbers a bit. An interesting trend to look at this month is how variant numbers affect the sales. Several titles benefitted from being included in one or more of Marvel’s themed variant programs this month. In October, Marvel had 3 variant themes, the Anti-Bullying variants, Deadpool 75th anniversary variants and Hasbro toy variants. Many of these issues were in the middle of an arc and normally would have suffered standard attrition of -1 to -3%, but due to these variant programs they got a nice +3 to +5% sales boost. Variants are one of many incentive programs that companies use to boost sales. Recently Marvel and DC have been doing these themed variants across multiple books and they definitely seem to be working. Whether or not, they are actually good for comic sales in the long term is another question entirely. What do you think of variants? Let’s discuss it in the comments below. For now let’s dive into the numbers.

This month has some fun new comics added to the roster headed by George Perez’s Siren from Boom! Studios. Of course Image had its fair share of new titles, with Copperhead and Roche Limit having stellar debuts. While Marvel had a title overload last month, in September DC had a special month with special and regular editions for the N52. All that means that there were only 105 indie titles charting in the top 300, which is still a bit down from last month’s 126. Understandably, overall indie title sales were down at 1,315,225 compared to last month’s 1,766,686 for average sales of 12,52, a slight decrease from last month’s 14,021. Overall there 12 titles went up, 72 titles went down, with the rest made up primarily of new issues and a few specials.

Out with the old, in with the new? As we've been reporting, October comics sales were pretty damn massive. It's the culmination of a year that started a little rocky but has blossomed as new trends blew into town behind a strong trade wind. Multiversity's David Harper has the much needed big think piece on what's happening complete with CHARTS. First he points out that The Big Two are still the big two:

October smashed all comics records from the last decade-plus again, with a thousand new comic books, graphic novels, and magazines hitting the market. Based on Comichron's analysis of data released by Diamond Comic Distributors, comics shops in North America ordered more than $56 million in printed product during the month. Seven comic books had orders of more than 100,000 copies. Click to see the sales estimates for comics ordered in October 2014. Highlights of the month included Diamond's Halloween ComicFest, its fall counterpart to Free Comic Book Day — and topping the charts again, we have a comic book whose sales were greatly inflated by a single order from the pop culture subscription club, Loot Crate. Image's Walking Dead #132 far outdistanced other comic books offered in October, with estimated orders of more than 326,000 copies.