Sales Charts

Diamond has released their November basic data dump, and no sales rebound sight, with overall sales down 8.28 percent from a year ago and down 6.64 percent from November. However, graphic novel sales surged 14.84 percent since last year, driven by sales of THE WALKING DEAD trade collections. John Jackson Miller already has his preliminary analysis up. Diamond has recently started releasing much more information on comparative sales -- I'm told this is because the partial figures they were releasing were giving rise to inaccurate projections by such folks as Miller. We have a lot more data to go on on how the market changes from year over year; let's be judicious in how we analyze it. Overall, the comics market is down 5.66 percent YTD in dollars and -4.18 percent in units from 2009. While that isn't a great number, considering the economy, it could be worse.

Author/historian/statistician John Jackson Miller used his holiday very productively: to put some of the missing years of comics sales stats up at his...

September was a fairly low-profile month for DC's comic-book business. In terms of new releases, there were the debut of the Freedom Fighters series, a Justice Society of America Special and a bunch of one-shots reviving the company's old war titles. Still, thanks to a handful of returning DC Universe and Vertigo books that had missed their release dates in August, average and overall periodical sales slightly recovered, as expected. WildStorm published a few one-shot specials tying in with the Red film and reviving Wetworks, of all things, with less than spectacular results.

by Paul O'Brien Marvel's biggest release for September was the relaunch of the Wolverine titles, in an attempt to undo the damage caused when the...

September may not have seemed to create any records for sales, but if you look more closely at the charts you’ll discover some interesting...

Comics writer and armchair statistician John Jackson Miller was very, very excited by Diamond's decision to release year-to-year comparisons for their sales charts. While such maths make us go catatonic, in a blog post, he explains that this missing info has enabled a much more accurate view of comics' long tail -- and it's a healthy tail. In an email, he writes:

Diamond just released the top ten and market share reports for October and added comparative --monht to month and year to year -- charts for the first time. Paging Paul and Marc! The comparisons are not comforting but actually show graphic novel sales up 13% from a year ago. Superman Earth One was a big hit, and The Walking Dead Effect is supplanting the Watchmen and Scott Pilgrim effects.

A couple of developments in the ongoing pamphletpocalypse/sales adjustment. § At long last John Jackson Miller has appeared with comforting words to explain why September's sales figures weren't cause to jump out the window. This may be just our interpretation, but it appears that the plunge isn't so much that all periodical sales are shrinking as top periodical sales are slipping. Miller explains that the tail-end of the long tail is actually HEALTHIER than ever.

Every Friday, The New York Times presents its "graphic books" best seller list. It's compiled from BookScan, Diamond, and, as far as we can tell, magic juju algorithms of some kind. It is, like all best seller lists, probably a little subjective and magical, but it certainly reflects a stable metric of what books are selling briskly that week. Given all that we've talked about this week in terms of superheroes and literary comics and manga and what not...let's see exactly what is selling THIS week in American comics, with my own commentary.

August 2010 wasn't a great month for the direct market as a whole, and DC Comics was no exception. The current tent-pole title Brightest Day and its tie-in books kept performing solidly overall, but a number of other high-profile books, including Green Lantern, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, Batman and Robin and The Flash missed their August shipping dates, putting a bit of a dent in DC's periodical performance: Overall dollar sales for new comic books were the lowest since June 2009, and average unit sales dropped to their second-lowest point of the last 12 months. For the publisher's Vertigo brand, August was particularly tough, with estimated average unit sales dropping to a new all-time low of 9,094. Again, though, the schedule is the culprit: With American Vampire, Joe the Barbarian and Jack of Fables, some of Vertigo's best-selling comic-book titles didn't come out in August. At the WildStorm imprint, average unit sales crashed back to just above 6K, and in this case, the schedule had little to do with it. At this stage, it's not hard to see why DC is pulling the plug on WildStorm.

Overall, direct market sales for August were substantially down, prompting a bit of handwringing online. And it's true that no title even came close to reaching the 100,000 mark (for only the third time since Diamond achieved their monopoly of the direct market). It's not so much that sales on individual titles suddenly lurched down in August. They've been dropping for a while, and the comparisons with one or two years ago make fairly grim reading at the moment (though bear in mind they don't show books being cancelled and replaced by higher-selling new launches). Rather, it's a month without any really big releases from either company. Marvel's major launch was a new NAMOR series, which lands just outside the top 40, while the biggest story events were the X-Men/vampires affair and the Daredevil-centred SHADOWLAND. As usual, Marvel had the largest share of the direct market, leading DC by 45% to 32% in terms of units, and 41% to 28% in dollars.

It's fitting that September's top selling comic features an image of Wolverine crouching atop a giant turd, because overall, sales were in the crapper, and the whole quarter was in the dumpster, ICv2 tells us. If you think we're exaggerating, the normally understated ICv2's use of the word "Sucked" is a strong indicator.