Sales Charts

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...

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: