Sales Charts

As expected, although still shockingly, Rocket Raccoon #1 by Skottie Young was the #1 comics periodical for July, according to Diamond's just released stats. As reported earlier, RR #1 sold some 300,000 copies—100,000 of them through a single order from bulk seller Loot Crate. Even so, 200,000 copies is a high water mark for a character viewed as a minor oddity a few months ago. As usual, and perhaps comfortingly, Batman #33 took the second spot, but Harley Quinn #8 was also in the top 10, another sign of the audience diversity that is beginning to take hold. Marvel

In yesterday's comments on the Mike Dawson Mid-career assessment, retailer Brian Hibbs stepped in with some comments, including this one

Change is coming! As I researched and wrote this month’s article in the week before Comic Con, Marvel made several huge announcements. Mjolnir will now be wielded by a woman in a new Thor series. The Falcon will wield the shield in a new Captain America. The Avengers will see major Roster changes in Avengers Now.

Now if you’ve been following these sales articles, none of this should have surprised you. Sure the details are exciting and interesting, but we’ve known for a while now that sales on the Avengers books and the big 3 marvel heroes (Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor) have gotten stale. It was time for a change, what is exciting about these announcements is that these aren’t small changes but big changes that garnered national media attention and hopefully will mean big (and hopefully lasting) sales boosts. Let’s look at the numbers for this month.

The big DC sales news for June was not (as I had expected) the new creative team on Superman, but rather the unexpected huge effect that DC's Bombshell Variant covers had on those comics lucky enough to sport them. Some background: For some time now DC has been doing theme variant covers on many of their best-selling rites each month: Steampunk variants, Robot Chicken variants, MAD variants, Batman 66 variants, etc. Prior to June these were always incentive variants, where retailers could order one variant cover for every so many of the regular cover they ordered (e.g. in May the Batman '66 variant was a 1:25 variant, meaning that for each title retailers could order 1 Batman '66 cover for every 25 regular covers they ordered on a title). Conventional wisdom is that this increased the number of issues sold, as retailers could mark up the price of the variant covers and sell them to collectors it was believed that they would order extra a copies in order to get to the incentive level.

Another decent month for Image, who have all of the top four new entries, including Warren Ellis’s return to creator-owned books. Elsewhere Valiant appear to be going through a radical shift in publishing model, and don’t look too healthy over-all. Stick around after the top 300, as there’s a bit of an extra this month. 149 indie titles charted in the top 300, slightly down on last month’s 151. Overall sales were up at 1,632,573, compared to last month’s 1,688,787 and the average sales this month are 10,957, down on last month’s 11,184. 16 titles went up in sales and 116 went down, with the rest made up of new entries and specials. Image are number one again with an 8.86% dollar share and an 9.96% market share, IDW go up to second place with a 6.38% dollar share and 4.18% market share. Dark Horse have a 5.96% dollar share and a 5.50% market share, Dynamite have a 2.30% dollar share and 2.29% market share and Boom! have a 1.97 % dollar share and 1.84% market share.

As there will be no industry white paper at San Diego, where Milton Griepp traditionally releases his industry sales figures for the year, he and John Jackson Miller has teamed up for an estimate of the size of the comics market in 2013: $870 million. That's up $135 million from 2012 -- a very sizable increase. With sales this year generally flat it probably won't be a big increase unless something really nutty happens, but that shows that it wasn't just your imagination: 2013 was a pretty swell year for the comics.

OUTCAST #1, the new book by Robert Kirkman and Paul Azaceta has been a huge success, we're told with orders surpassing The Walking Dead...

It was the usual story for June sales figures just released by Diamond. DC led the single issue chart with Batman #32, but Marvel...

Sales Charts! You love them, I love them, and here's one I haven't linked to before. Publishers Weekly (my other job) is running category best sellers lists for Apple's iBooks portal and here's the line for the last week of June. I'm pubbing the whole list this time just to get you sale chart analysts ginned up, but in the future a link will do. Note these books are iBooks format and not via Comixology.

Original Sin is Marvel’s big new event and it debuted at 147k and then dropped down to 92k. But is that good for a major event book? For fun I pulled the numbers for #1 issues of the last several big event books from Marvel to see how Original Sin stacks up. As you can see out of these 7 books it ranks 5th. I did better than Siege and Fear Itself, but worse than Age of Ultron, AVX, Secret invasion or Civil War. Two other interesting trends to note is that events have become more frequent and sell worse. I cherry picked these events because they fell around the same time of year as Original Sin and were Avengers-focused, but the last few years have been very event heavy and sales have been dropping overall on these events. They are still the best-selling books of their month generally but Marvel has yet to recapture the excitement and sales of Civil War.

Greetings, sales charts fans! It's time once again to look at DC's sales figures. DC take five of the top ten spots on the Diamond sales charts, and after taking a shellacking on market share last month pull up nearly even to their Marvelous Competition, though in a month where the market was down from the previous year. There are some good things to point to: DC's strategy of canceling their low-selling ongoing DCU titles and replacing them with weekly titles is working, at least so far. With the exception of last September's anomalous 3D cover month, May 2014 is the best average sales for the DCU line since in nearly two years, since June 2012. Most importantly, Batman Eternal and Futures End give them several comics in the 50-75K range, an area in which they have been sorely lacking as of late. Mind you this isn't a long-term strategy, but it keeps the bears at bay for a few more months until the Next Big Event or line-wide gimmick comes along.

  by John Jackson Miller Marvel's Original Sin #1 led the market in a month that included a Spider-Man movie release and what Diamond Comic Distributors...