Sales Charts

If you watch the cable newsers these days, you know that instant analysis and punditocracy of the kind once confined to sports is now the only way to analyze anything of import. Sound bites, gotchas, double backs, keeping em honest...analyzing what people are saying about what people are saying is way more productive than actually identifying and solving problems...so everyone does it. And while it isn't quite as entertaining as 2011's Republican primary debate analysis, say, comics have developed their own "Counterpoint Arena" in the last few months, as executives from DC and Marvel come out and give their play-by-play on the just released sales charts.

Here’s the drill: Diamond has released the top 100 titles and relative rankings for the monthly comics for March 2012. Since Walking Dead is usually a fairly consistently selling title, I’m going to plug last month’s Walking Deadnumbers ( Comichron had January’sWalking Dead estimated at 32,361) 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.

Yesterday's initial sales charts left no doubt that so far 2012 has been a strong year for comics sales, but the numbers were also flat from last March -- five Wednesdays in 2011 vs four in 2012, perhaps? The numbers prompted a vague shadow of worry to cloud the brow of Milton Griepp at ICv2:

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.