Sales Charts

With Marvel refocussing on more issues of fewer titles, and with the next wave of new titles presumably not due until after AVENGERS VS X-MEN, it's a pretty quiet month for new titles. The main new launch is WINTER SOLDIER, there's the much-delayed return of THE TWELVE… and that's pretty much it. Normal service is resumed, as Marvel had the largest share of the direct market, leading DC by 39% to 35% in unit share, and 36% to 29% in dollars. Bear in mind, though, that February was a five week month and DC didn't take advantage of that extra week to ship further material. Thanks as always to ICV2.com for permission to use these figures.

Marvel bashed its way back to the top in March, winning both dollars and units and the top book with AvX #1. After getting shut out of the top 10 books for the last few months, they had three books, including the AvX 0 issues and AVENGERS ASSEMBLE #1. AvX #1 is invoiced for March although it only went on sale yesterday, in April, because it shipped to retailers a week early. Comparative charts showed March 2012 pretty flat with 2011, with only graphic novel sales up appreciably -- and that's because of a surge in WALKING DEAD VOLUME 1 sales. This perrennial led the GN chart yet again, buoyed by the TV show no doubt.

Challengers Comics + Conversation, one of the better known shops in Chicago, has posted a look at how DC's new 52 relaunch has done at their store. It isn't a raw number count, it's about the percentage change from launch (and just the first 4 weeks of sales -- no 2nd/3rd/4th prints) to sales on issue #6 of each title. Effectively, this is a "who kept their readers" list. Two books managed to gain sales from the first issues sales, everything else dropped significantly, including 2 books that nobody who shops there would buy.

A recent scan of graphic novel bestsellers on BarnesAndNoble.com from 15 March.

Over the weekend, I did a rough estimate of Diamond Top 100 sales chart. Good 'ole Walking Dead turns out to have sold 32,361 in the "official" estimates vs. the 31,596 from January I used for the estimate. That +2.4%, which is just barely outside standard deviation, so it looks like the initial estimates were close again.

The official sales estimates are out and it turns out that February 2012 was a legit strong month for comics, and it wasn't just those five Wednesdays, ICv2 writes. Turns out digital isn't killing comics just yet.

Here are the complete sales charts from Diamond for last month:

By Todd Allen Here's the drill: Diamond has released the top 100 titles and relative rankings for graphic novels for February 2012.  Since Walking Dead is...

Here's the drill: Diamond has released the top 100 titles and relative rankings for the monthly comics for February 2012. Since Walking Dead is usually a fairly consistently selling title, I'm going to plug last month's Walking Dead numbers (both Comichron and ICV2 had January's Walking Dead estimated at 31,596) into Diamond's rankings. That should get us relatively close to the formal estimates that should be out soon. If Walking Dead had a good month, the numbers should be higher. If Walking Dead had a bad month, the numbers will be lower. History suggests this will be within +/- 5%, if not +/- 1%, praise to Great Kirkman.

Another split decision for supremacy in February, as DC swept the top ten comics, led by JUSTICE LEAGUE, for the second month in a row. However Marvel was the top publisher in both units and dollars; their win was more substantial in the dollar category, meaning the $3.99 price point is making an impact. Overall, it was a good month, however, with comics up 10.84% and graphic novel sales up 11.45% over January's sales for an overall increase in the print categories of 11.03% over the previous month. Compared to February 2011, the month's sales were up 22.26% for comics and 15.65% for graphic novels for an overall increase of 20.11% as compared to the previous year. Pretty good numbers all around.

Walking Dead and Buffy top the chart again, but the debuts of Lord of the Jungle, Fatale and Danger Girl: Revolver push the Turtles down to sixth. Elsewhere there are two new Transformers ongoings, a few more new Image books, and the end of several titles.

 

136 indie books charted this month, 10 up on last month and again less Marvel or DC books charting this month. The bottom book sold 2,606, half of what it was 2 months ago. In total those books sold approximately 1,052,459 down from last month's 1,067,927 with more titles. That's the second month in a row that'. Average sales are 7,739 per book, well down from last month's 8,475. As usual, UK and European sales from Diamond UK are not reported in this chart.

 

This month Image were again the number three publisher, with 5.48% dollar share and a 4.83 market share, followed by Dark Horse with 4.89% dollar share and 3.55% market share, IDW with a 4.35% dollar share and a 3.78% market share, Dynamite with a 3.46% dollar share and a 3.66% market share, Boom with 1.66% dollar share and 1.35% market share and Eaglemoss with 1.47% dollar and 0.30% market share. IDW, Dynamite & Boom are up for the month, everyone else is down.

Beyond sweeping a perfect 10 out of the month's Top 10 comic books, DC's "New 52" titles are also starting to show first signs of stabilization in January. The average "New 52" title dropped 7.4% in sales, down from 17.4% in December and 19.6% in November. This gives reason to be cautiously optimistic on the longer-term prospects of DC's relaunched line. The trend should be taken with a grain of salt, however, as DC made a number of changes to its various retailer incentives in January that may be affecting sales one way or another. On Detective Comics, Batman: The Dark Knight, Superman and Aquaman, the returnability incentive was replaced with 1:25 variant-cover incentives. Batwoman, Green Lantern: New Guardians and Swamp Thing, which were promoted with a special-discount incentive from September through December, also switched to 1:25 variant-cover incentives in January. Finally, the threshold retailers were required to meet in January to qualify for returnability on the 37 titles that weren't promoted through variant-cover or discount incentives changed from 125% of retailers' May 2011 orders to 100% of November 2011 orders. With this in mind, let's wait for the February figures to see if the trend holds when incentives are equal from one month to the next.