Sales Charts

A busy month, as SIEGE wraps up, and the Heroic Age books begin, including the debut issues of both AVENGERS and SECRET AVENGERS. The "World War Hulks" crossover begins, "Second Coming" continues in the X-books, and the new ASTONISHING miniseries ship their first issues. Once again, Marvel had the largest share of the North American direct market, beating DC by 46% to 35% in terms of units, and 41% to 31% in dollars. For the benefit of any new readers, bear in mind the following disclaimers. These are estimates of orders placed by stores in the North American direct market. They don't include sales on newsstands, or to other countries (such as the UK). And most of this material will be repackaged in collected editions or made available online, so there will be further sales in other formats. On the other hand, we don't know whether the retailers managed to sell everything they ordered. With books that have been around a while, the retailers presumably have a fairly good idea of how many copies they can sell; with new launches, there's a bit more guesswork involved.

ICv2 has posted its sales estimates for May,  and AVENGERS led the pack with a strong number as overall periodical sales went up by...

April brought a hat trick for recently crowned DC Entertainment executive Geoff Johns, who wrote the three top-selling North American comic books. Thanks to the strong debuts of Brightest Day and The Flash, DC Comics' April numbers remained rock-solid after the conclusion of Blackest Night. The two new titles took the two top spots in the Top 300 chart, while Green Lantern, Batman and Robin and Green Lantern Corps also placed in the Top 10. Compared to Marvel, the publisher was still a distant second in terms of market share, however, and DC's average and total sales have seen better days. At WildStorm, average comic-book sales fell below the 6K mark for the second time in the imprint's history. This wasn't unexpected, given that neither of WildStorm's two top-selling series, Astro City and Ex Machina, came out in April. At Vertigo, meanwhile, average sales appear to be solidifying around 10K again, thanks to a range of books that are selling well for a change. See below for the details, and please consider the small print at the end of the column. Thanks to Milton Griepp and ICv2.com for the permission to use their figures. An overview of ICv2.com's estimates can be found here.

The top “indie” book on the charts this month is a $1 issue of The Walking Dead #1. However, none of the other Image $1 books have charted either this month or last, so I’m not sure how accurate this numbers is. Invincible Returns was the best selling non-reprint #1 of the month, and led to a substantial increase for the regular issue of Invincible as well. While Turf #1, also from Image, was the highest launch of the month. Image had a 4.26% unit share, and a 3.96% dollar share, Dark Horse had a 3.82% unit share and a 4.88% dollar share, IDW had a 3.41% unit share and a 3.92% dollar share. Dynamite fell to a 2.38% unit share and a 2.33% dollar share.

Crossover season continues! SIEGE #4 slipped into May, but that didn't stop a bunch of tie-in books from shipping, including the final issues of several Avengers titles before the line gets revamped. HULK and INCREDIBLE HULK didn't ship either, but there's still some WORLD WAR HULK books on this list. And the X-books kick off their major crossover, "Second Coming." April also saw the release of the Iron Man movie, complete with the launch of a second monthly Iron Man title. And we've got the first issues of new DEADPOOL CORPS, S.H.I.E.L.D. and BLACK WIDOW, as well as a bunch of miniseries. As usual, Marvel had the largest share of the direct market, beating DC by 45% to 33% in units, and 39% to 30% in dollars.

By Matthew Murray

Dynamite grabs the top indie comic spot this month with the first issue of their adaptation of Kevin Smith’s Green Hornet script. However, issue 2 sees a fairly large drop, and people seem unsure if the market can support the five Green Hornet titles Dynamite plans on launching.

Elsewhere on the chart Green Hornet Year One written by Matt Wagner is the second biggest indie launch of the month, The Guild and Terminator are Dark Horse’s newest launches, and Zenescope shipped a lot of books.

IDW had a 3.61% market share, and 4.02% dollar share, Dark Horse had 3.33% market share and 4.76% dollar share (gotta love those trade paperback sales), Dynamite had 3.08% market share and 3.40% dollar share, and Image had 3.01% market share and 3.22% dollar share.

I’ve listed every indie title in the top 225, every Dark Horse, Image, and IDW title in the top 300, and a selection of other titles.

Thanks to icv2.com and Milton Griepp for permission to use these numbers, which can be found here.

by Marc-Oliver Frisch

March brought jolly good sales for DC's comic-book business!

In fact, even considering that it was a month with five delivery days for new comics instead of just four and, consequently, one extra week of re-orders, the numbers seem almost too good on a range of titles, but maybe I'm just paranoid.

In particular, DC's Vertigo imprint is beginning to look more solid than it has in ages. Partly, that's because Vertigo released a whopping 19 new comic books in March, a new record for them, but also because many of those books performed well.

The big launch of the month was American Vampire, of course, a new ongoing series co-written by Stephen King. It sold an estimated 33,762 copies, the highest first-month sales for Vertigo since Diamond started providing data on sales to retailers in March 2003. (Andy Diggle and Enrique Breccia's Swamp Thing #1 came close: It moved 33,382 units in March 2004.)

More significantly for Vertigo's long-term health, there are signs of moderate success with a number of other recent launches. Sales on titles like The Unwritten, Joe the Barbarian and -- to a lesser extent -- Sweet Tooth indicate that the practice of publishing debut issues with low introductory prices is bearing fruit. The Fables spin-off Cinderella and the maxiseries Daytripper are also turning out to be solid sellers. Blackest Night and its tie-ins keep the publisher's DC Universe line in reasonably good shape in March, while the WildStorm imprint saw an increase of 35% in average comic-book sales. The latter is a mixed blessing, though. The spike is entirely due to a highly irregular three new issues of WildStorm top-sellers Astro City and Ex Machina, neither of which came out in April, and one of which has two more issues to go before reaching its conclusion.

It's still the event season at Marvel, with SIEGE and FALL OF THE HULKS in full sway, "X-Necrosha" wrapping up, and the "Second Coming" crossover just beginning. March also saw the latest stage in the relaunch of the Ultimate imprint, namely the return of ULTIMATES, and the start of Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's NEMESIS. Oh, and if you feel there's still a dearth of Deadpool comics out there, look out for all five issues of the PRELUDE TO DEADPOOL CORPS miniseries, setting up a new Deadpool title to start in April. Needless to say, Marvel had the largest share of the North American direct market yet again. This time they beat DC by 47% to 30% in unit share, and 42% to 27% in dollars.

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