Sales Charts

As DC keeps clowning around and pushing hard to single-handedly choke the concept of irony to death by summer, the company's average and total sales figures for new comic books performed solidly in the month of February. After hiring Bob Harras, hiring Rob Liefeld, hiring every writer and artist who worked at Marvel in 1999, releasing a Green Lantern title especially for kids, releasing more Watchmen comics several of which written by J. Michael Straczynski, making a habit of hiring, promoting, then firing creative personnel on all kinds of titles every month, releasing Before Watchmen: Dollar Bill, hiring a raging homophobe to write Superman and announcing "WTF month," in February 2013 DC released Justice League of America #1, a new high-profile Geoff Johns vehicle promoted with not one, not three, not 12, but 54 different cover choices, thus making it something like the lynchpin of gimmick-driven market gaming. I mean, the plastic-ring thing from a couple of years back was a fair stab, but this one is bolder.

Marvel Now rolls on into February. This month's major events are the relaunch of UNCANNY X-MEN, the "Point One" prologue issue for GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, the return of NOVA with Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness, and a new take on SECRET AVENGERS. More generally, the first wave of relaunched titles have now been around long enough that we're starting to get a sense of which ones are already settling down, and which ones aren't. Though DC had the top selling book of the month - JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA - Marvel still had the largest share of the North American direct market, leading DC by 38% to 33% in units and 35% to 29% in dollars.

Three pretty interesting posts on book sales and Amazon which, if you triangulate them, give you a good look at where the publishing business stands this Monday morning as Winter turns into Spring 2013:

Between "Death of the Family," "Throne of Atlantis" and "Rise of the Third Army," any DC title selling 60,000 units or more in January took part in one of the three current major crossovers, which means all 10 of the company's Top 25 books. In other words: Scott Snyder and Geoff Johns are running the DC Universe right now -- and not much that's not within their reach is working all that well.

Walking Dead sees a big rise as expected, while Saga and Buffy sandwich the new Star Wars book, and Invincible’s one hundredth issue. Elsewhere, it’s a good month for all-ages comics, and Image have their usual batch of debuts. Dynamite have a poorer month than usual for sales drops, but a round of relaunches are on the horizon.

The February sales estimates are in over at The Comics Chronicles and what a strange February it was. DC papered over a decaying mess at...

By John Jackson Miller via Comichron DC's Justice League of America #1 turned in the strongest single-issue sales performance for a comic book in the month of February...

The rolling program of Marvel Now! relaunches continued in January, with SUPERIOR SPIDER-MAN, NEW AVENGERS, SAVAGE WOLVERINE, UNCANNY X-FORCE, YOUNG AVENGERS and MORBIUS. Plus, there's the miniseries DEADPOOL: KILLUSTRATED - and, just as interesting as the January launches, the continuing question of how the earlier Marvel Now titles are settling down. Once again, Marvel had the largest share of the North American direct market, leading DC by 40% to 35% in units, and 35% to 32% in dollars.

Marvel topped both units and dollars in February, while DC reclaimed the top comics spot with Justice League of America #1 by Johns and...

Industry analyst John Jackson Miller has taken the Bookscan numbers posted by Brian Hibbs, and added them with the Diamond year-end sales charts, and then triangulated them with a cosine angle, trapped the outlines in their own layer, tossed the results with a bit of olive oil and garlic, and presented it all for you to read. The above infographic gives a visual representation of sales for each product (GNs and periodical) in various channels; as Miller points out, library and digital sales are not included and the Bookscan numbers are very low, but the end result is a combined comics market of more than $700 million, which Miller notes, is the first time comics sales have reached this level since 1993 or 1994, the high times of speculation and chromium covers.

It’s pretty much as you were in a fairly quiet month for new books. Boom’s dollar-book Deathmatch and the return of Hellboy, alongside a new Adventure Time spin-off and Brian Wood’s new book Mara are the notable debuts. Walking Dead, Saga & My Little Pony top the chart again, elsewhere the Image Firsts reprint programme features strongly, and a few long running licensed books end ahead of relaunches.

By Brian Hibbs (Originally published February 2013) “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics” For the tenth (!) year in a row, I’m...