Diamond: April is the Cruelest Month for Comics Sales

[Editors note: I never got around to posting the April charts from Diamond as I was at a show, but in the interests of completeness here they are.] 
Sales declined in most categories in April, partly because last April included Action #1000, but also because DC’s output really is shrinking. Marvel led periodicals with War of the Realms #1, while Mark Millar and Netflix led graphic novel units with The Magic Order Vol. 1. 
However Batman periodicals and Venom and Infinity Gauntlet trades continued to do well.
John Jackson Miller reported on other notable stats for this month, including a new 2-to-1 Marvel to DC ratio:

Action #1000 alone isn’t enough to explain the difference, however, and the contributing factor there is one we’ve talked about a lot lately: DC just isn’t publishing many comics. Back in December, DC released just 52 comic books, its lowest number in any month since 1991; the holiday-truncated month was partially the cause of that. Last month, DC matched that number with no holidays in the mix; its 52 new periodical releases were 29 fewer than April 2018. Marvel, meanwhile, took up the slack again, releasing 106 comic books, 20 more than last Apriland its highest number since June 2016, before the 2017 slowdown began.
That’s right: Marvel released more than twice as many new comic books than DC did in April. That has never happened in the six years since Diamond’s been publishing new release counts — nor does Marvel appear to have doubled DC’s number of entries in the Top 300 charts at any point since at least 1996. The only time we can definitely say it happened before was in 1974, when DC’s line had shrunk and Marvel was practically blowing it off the newsstands, publishing dozens more titles.
Interestingly, it has occurred in recent memory in the other direction: when Marvel reduced the size of its line after its bankruptcy, DC more than doubled Marvel’s periodical output several times; March 2000 saw DC chart 98 new comic books versus Marvel’s 41. (It was also a historically bad time for sales overall, though it appears that Marvel did not simply expand its way out of that crisis: per-release sales appear to have improved before line size increases took place.)

Graphic novels are down 6% for the year, periodical are down a little over 5%. We have some doldroms here.
But let’s see what May brings, eh?

TOP COMIC BOOK PUBLISHERS

 COMPARATIVE SALES STATISTICS

NEW TITLES SHIPPED

TOP 10 COMIC BOOKS BY UNITS SHIPPED

TOP 10 COMIC BOOKS BY DOLLARS INVOICED

TOP 10 GRAPHIC NOVELS & TRADE PAPERBACKS BY UNITS SHIPPED

TOP 10 GRAPHIC NOVELS & TRADE PAPERBACKS BY DOLLARS INVOICED

TOP 10 BOOKS BY UNITS SHIPPED

TOP 10 TOYS BY DOLLARS INVOICED

TOP 10 GAMES BY DOLLARS INVOICED