Sales Charts

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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