Comics had a great year in 2025. As a veteran of many industry ups and downs, I’m always a little skeptical of either rhapsodic praise or industry is dying gloom. Given the state of economic insecurity that the world is in, and the ongoing Diamond mess, my first thought would be that comics sales might hit choppy waters in ’25.
But I’ve been told over and over that the stores that are doing good are actually doing great. At Baltimore Comic Con I ran into one retailer who told me he was making so much money that he was going to have to talk to his accountant about what to do with it all. Just one piece of anecdata – and some stores are having tough times, definitely – but I’m convinced!
The reason I have to be convinced by sincere testimonials is that we have almost no data to back any of this up. So I was a little excited when SKTCHD’s David Harper told me I needed to listen to his interview with Lunar Distribution’s co-owner Christina Merkler. In this tumultuous but successful year, Merkler has emerged as a pivotal industry figure, and I’m glad to see her speaking out publicly more.
As always, you should just listen to the whole thing – Merkler goes into their emergency expansion after Diamond’s collapse, and many other industry trends. As the main distributor for DC and Image, and life raft for many set adrift by Diamond, Lunar has been in the thick of it.
There were even a couple of numbers discussed.
“First of all, the numbers are bonkers, like, we’re double digits up this year, which is incredible,” she told Harper. “We have some stores that are 1,000% up from last year.”
Also notable: Lunar had 462 new accounts this year, up from 200 in 2024. “That’s crazy. So we know that some of this has to do with Diamond, right? That there were people who just never came over to us from Diamond. So I don’t know how they bought DC product….But it’s been incredible.”
One of the things I miss from the Diamond days is the statistics on stores and sales that would be dutifully presented at every Diamond Retailer Summit. The number of new accounts was never gangbusters – up 3% would be notable – but it was proof against the idea that “comics shops are dying!” so prevalent on other YouTube channels. Lunar’s 462 new accounts isn’t a percentage, but I’m guessing it is more than a 3% rise.
Still, John Jackson Miller can’t do much with the statement “The numbers are bonkers.” We know that DC is killing it with the Absolute line, the Batman relaunch and now DC K.O. but we have no idea how much. The Marvel/DC crossovers have been huge….but how huge? We’ll never know.
This is where I once again start crying out “Where are the sales charts?” We’ve lost Bookscan, and ICv2’s periodical numbers are based on ComicHub, which is a pretty small sample size. Absolute Batman #1 is into it’s eighth or ninth printing, and sold some 400,000 copies in 2024. H2SH #1 had 400,000 in initial orders, a number so exciting that it got leaked. I’m told DC K.O. also has big big numbers, but no leaks. And here….the trail goes cold. Image keeps telling us that their books have sold out and gone back to press, we’re told this or that book is a huge seller…but we have almost no comparative charts to back any of this up.
In particular, DC could actually be beating Marvel in sales for the first time in quite a while, but the ComicHub data seems to show Marvel continuing to rule the pie chart. Given all the energy around DC’s moves this year, this seems odd but…we’ll never know.
I’m not alone in wishing to have more data. Various publishers, retailers and creators have told me they also miss the charts. One of the most exciting elements of the COMET Standard metadata project was that we would be able to get sales charts again, but that is still years away. Other folks have told me over the past couple of years they were working on charting projects, but those have also fizzled at least for now.
Of course, there are many publishers who don’t want any numbers made public for various reasons.
With comics have such a banner year, sales charts are more missed than ever. It would be incredibly useful to have a more tangible metric than a retailer telling me “We had so many new customers come in for Batman #1!” I love hearing these stories, and it’s exciting to know so many people are having such a great year. I just wish we had more numbers to back it up.
Years back when our industry’s largest publisher was purchased, I took a call from an analyst with the buyer who was trying to get a handle on the scale and workings of the Direct Market — and who was surprised at the number of people in the business who’d told him to contact me, an archivist working on the outside. I explained that was because the comics industry had long enjoyed a high level of transparency for many years when it came to circulation data.
The scope of that, too, stunned the caller — as it was unlike anything in any other market they operated in. I explained that comics’ history of transparency was a happy accident — first we had reporting obligations to advertisers and the postal service, then distributors who wanted to build their businesses by showing their customers proof of what success looked like in other stores nationwide.
The analyst understood and said he was thankful for the guidance, but that call told me transparency wasn’t necessarily a fit with how things were done at the mega-corporate level. It’s worth noting that Diamond’s reporting practices were left to continue for many years after that, but I always considered it borrowed time until some corporate decision somewhere changed everything. The exact sequence of events was something I never foresaw, of course, but I’m grateful for history’s sake that we had the reporting as long as we did.
Too bad that there’s no way to get print runs directly from the various printers used…that information must be stored somewhere.
I take distribution sales with a grain of salt. We need the sell through data at stores. How much of these sales are padded by landfill chaff purchased to gain access to quota variants?
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