Sales Charts

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...

It's my FAVORITE day of the year, when Brian Hibbs posts the year-end sales from bookstores via the Bookscan chart. Now we know these numbers are significantly low, but as I always say, they present a metric. The huge take away? Well, we all knew The Waking Dead was a juggernaut,—sales in this franchise would have made it the #3 publisher all by itself—but after that it's kids comics all the way, led by the maybe-comics of Dork Diaries, but following by Big Nate, Ninjago, Ursula Vernon's Dragonbreath, Drama and so on.

This month's DC sales column is not being hosted at The Beat. However if you speak German you can read ithere. The column will return in an English language version next month.

The January sales estimates are up at The Comics Chronicles.  It's a big January and is looking like a win for Marvel, more so with their...

Diamond has released their preliminary top 10 and comparative charts for January, and it was another good month for Marvel and comics overall. Although periodical sales were down a bit from last month, GNs were up quite a bit — perhaps oddly given the Christmas sales season. Both periodical and graphic novels were up in strong doubles digits from January 2012, however, showing that the comic book recovery is well under way, no matter what you thing of creative shuffles.

The second month of Marvel Now titles arguably makes for more interesting sales data than the first. We're starting to get a sense of where some of the books that had huge launch numbers in November are actually going to settle down. And we're also seeing how the second-tier Marvel Now books are going to fare, with this month seeing the launches of CABLE & X-FORCE, THUNDERBOLTS and AVENGERS ARENA, as well as the relaunch of AVENGERS itself.

As always, Amazon’s best seller lists are only rolling snapshots, but it’s always interesting to peek into what’s selling. The Kindle isn’t known as an ideal comics reading platform, but the top 20 free and paid comics has both the usual suspects and some surprises. The paid list has the warhorses—Walking Dead, Big Nate, Geoff Johns—but the free list is a total mishmosh.

The big sales news for December was definitely coming out of the Marvel Now relaunch and the "death" of Peter Parker.  Big numbers on...