Sales Charts

Overall, sales were dramatically down in January, with Marvel regaining their top at the spot with FF #587 but Image making their best showing in three years.

Buffy held the top spot once again, while Joe Benitez’s Lady Mechanika was the biggest launch this month. Meanwhile Dark Horse launched new Star Wars, Hellboy, and Conan series, Avatar launched a new Lady Death series, and John Byrne’s Next Men returned from IDW.

As we did yesterday for the print charts, David Brothers data mines comiXology's year end-charts. There isn't that much to go on (only a top 10 in a few categories) but some trends do emerge, including, as with GNs, a preponderance of creator-owned work.

With Diamond's year-end sales charts released, along with year-to-year comparisons, the pundits are out in force, making all kinds of observations and suggestions. We'll try to run them down in an orderly fashion but you might want to get a cuppa...there are a lot of them,. We've bolded things for skimmers, however.

First off, heroic John Jackson Miller has taken all the sales charts and given us the Top 1000 Comics and Top 1000 GNs of 2010. Jackson finds softening in every region of the periodical chart:

The other day ICv2 released their sales estimates for December, and the year ended on a mixed note, as we previously reported: Comics were...

For all you number crunchers, here are the December sales charts in raw data form.

Marvel had quite a lot of new material on the market in November. Aside from AMAZING SPIDER-MAN shifting to a fortnightly format with its new "Big Time" direction, we've also got two new ongoing titles, GENERATION HOPE and SPIDER-GIRL. Further down the chart, there's also a veritable horde of new miniseries, including ASTONISHING THOR, OSBORN, SHE-HULKS and a whole bunch of CHAOS WAR tie-ins. As usual, Marvel had the largest share of the direct market. It's a relatively close month, though, with a lead over DC of 40% to 37% in unit share and 34% to 33% in dollars. A major factor there will be a number of high-profile Batman comics in the top 10.

The "Return of Bruce Wayne" and "Brightest Day" brands continued to be the driving force behind DC's periodical output in October. While most of the Batman books were on hiatus, a bunch of one-shots, collectively titled Bruce Wayne: The Road Home, filled the gap. Other October releases include the low-profile miniseries Knight and Squire and JLA/The 99. Consequently, average sales of the DC Universe line remained relatively flat.

by Paul O'Brien The big event on Marvel's publishing schedule for October was the relaunch of X-FORCE, which restarts from issue #1 and celebrates by...

Last month someone asked me if there had been more "indie" titles in the top 300, or if the high cut off rate for...

Buffy looks like it will hold on to its position as top “indie” book until its season 8 run finishes early next year. Meanwhile...

For your infographic entertainment, we've just posted Diamond's raw info in our popular "Sales Chart" category. We've also posted the top 50 Indies, Top...