Sales Charts

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...

Overall another quiet month, although excellent debuts from Jason Aaron’s Southern Bastards and Valiant’s Rai splash amongst the regular chart-toppers, and a few healthy new entries make their marks selling around the 10-15,000 copy mark .

151 indie titles charted in the top 300, slightly up on last month’s 150. Overall sales were up at 1,688,787, compared to last month’s 1,655,816 and the average sales this month are 11,184, up on last month’s 11,038. 19 titles went up in sales and 108 went down, with the rest made up of new entries and specials.

Image have another great month with a 9.34% dollar share and an 10.31% market share, while Dark Horse in second place have a 5.54% dollar share and 5.18% market share. IDW have a 5.10% dollar share and a 4.24% market share, Dynamite have a 2.49% dollar share and 2.47% market share and Boom! have a 2.07 % dollar share and 1.97% market share. Eaglemoss actually beat Dynamite on dollar sales at 2.14, but that equated to less than 0 .73% market share and were lumped in with the miscellaneous small publishers.

Welcome to the month of Spider-Man, the best-selling comic in over a decade. But with this one book breaking 500k, how is this the rest of the Marvel line doing? The last few months we’ve seen a lot of soft relaunches and some genuine new #1s, but while the new books like Ms. Marvel and Moon Knight are doing well, a lot of the new relaunches are floundering. Let’s break down a few overall statistics.

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, all of them Batman-titled books thanks to the debut of the weekly Batman Eternal. However, DC fall to their lowest Dollar Share and Unit Share in quite some time due to a combination of Marvel's relaunch of Amazing Spider-Man (with a boatload of order incentives and variant covers leading to over a half million in sales) and their own inability to get out many of their bestselling titles on a consistent schedule—Forever Evil, Sandman Overture and Superman Unchained) didn't ship this month, with Forever Evil's lateness causing a ripple effect through other titles like Justice League of America.

By Chris Rice Hello, my name’s Chris, nice to meet you. For the last three years or so, I’ve been writing the indie chart under...

Marvel led the month of April in comics sales behind the 500,000+ sales of Amazing Spider-Man #1, which DIamond confirmed as being "the best-selling comic book in both units and dollars in over a decade," and sales were up quite a bit from the previous month; however April was a five week month making direct comparisons hard to make. Still. sales are beginning to catch up year to year, and GN sales are up from 2013.