Sales Charts

By Paul O'Brien

[Editor's Note: As noted this is Paul's last column for now. He's been an incredible collaborator and commentator, and I think we all owe him a big round of applause! And yes I know these are late -- we'll have the new guys in place VERY shortly! Thanks again, Paul.] And so the end of an era is upon us. No, I do not speak of the latest cancellation of DEFENDERS, nor even of the final OZ miniseries. As Heidi explained a little while back, this will be my final sales column, after over a decade of writing these things. Good luck to whoever takes over for this; I'll be reading with interest, and with a sense of relief that I didn't have to do the number crunching. So. One last time! December sees a barrage of Inhumanity tie-ins, all building to the launch of the new series that's since been delayed. We also have the start of ORIGIN II, and the first of the Marvel Now Wave 2 titles. As per usual, Marvel had the largest share of the North American direct market, leading DC by 37% to 31% in unit terms, and 35% to 28% in dollars. Thanks as always to ICV2.com for permission to use these figures.

1.  ORIGIN II
12/13  Origin II #1 of 5 - 131,724

Books set in the past and with no direct impact on present day continuity generally seem to be a tough sell. But ORIGIN II is the top seller of the month, presumably because Marvel have successfully portrayed it as an event - in the sense of a book fans will be talking about.

By Brian Hibbs (Originally published February 2014) “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics” For the eleventh (!) year in a row, I’m...

About a month ago I took a "Snapshot" look at the best selling Amazon graphic novels. I look at this list every night about...

January was the cruelest month for comics sales, as the ICv2 headline starkly puts it: Only One Comic Above 100K. The one book was...

After an unusual couple of months things are pretty much back to normal this month, with the usual suspects of Walking Dead, Saga, Star Wars and My Little Pony joined by a few new Image titles and Valiant’s best-seller yet. At the bottom end of the charts we finally see a few titles returning, although possibly quite briefly in some cases.

150 indie titles charted in the top 300, up on last month’s 135. The indie chart sold approximately 1,820,321 comics, a bit down on last month’s 2,031,509. That’s all due to the increased numbers that Walking Dead added last month. It also means that the average sales this month are 12,153, down on last month’s 15,048. Out of the 150 books, only 20 went up in sales and 112 went down, with the rest made up of one-shots and debuts.

UPDATE: Folks I have a bunch of fantastic candidates for this position, so no more resumes please.

November was more of the same for DC, basically, with the "Forever Evil" and "Zero Year" crossovers rolling on, along with a couple of smaller ones. Oh, and Harley Quinn debuted.

Everyone knows you can check out a "rolling" best-seller list on Amazon in any category—including comics and graphic novels— any time you want. But...

It's a new year, and what better time to take a look back at what happened in 2013? Regular readers of The Beat know me...

Event season rolled on in November, as INFINITY reached its climax, while the Ultimate imprint's CATACLYSM got under way. Meanwhile, ASTONISHING X-MEN was relaunched as AMAZING X-MEN, and the MARVEL KNIGHTS X-MEN and LONGSHOT SAVES THE MARVEL UNIVERSE minis kick off. Though DC had four books in the top five - BATMAN, HARLEY QUINN, SUPERMAN UNCHAINED and FOREVER EVIL - Marvel still edged them in their share of the North American direct market, leading by 34% to 32% in unit terms, and 30% to 29% in dollars. As has already been pointed out on The Beat, this means Marvel and DC's combined dollar share dips below 60% - something that hasn't happened in a decade.

And here's Diamond's chart of the top 1000 comic books of the year, led by Walking Dead #115—giving Image a 2-for-2 topping the year...

Diamond has released the entire 1000-long list of GNs in 2013, and there is a lot of data mining here...like the fact that Image...