Report: Comics Sales in 2024

As a new year dawns, it’s time to look back and attempt to get a handle on comics sales in 2024. That’s nearly impossible, since no one (outside of the publishers) has any actual numbers, but below I’m going to aggregate what information we have. 

The “sales data crisis” has been going on for a few years now: since the great distribution split, we have no reliable numbers that bring together all publishers in one chart. The arrival of The Comet Standard, a baseline for metadata for comics publishers, is a project to help with this, however, progress on this has been slow due to various factors. I’ve checked in with some of the people behind the project over the last year, and just been told it’s moving forward slowly. Doubtless we’ll get an update at next month’s (!) ComicsPRO meeting. 

In the meantime, what I’ve done below is collate a bunch of sales lists. Almost NONE of them include numbers, which makes sorting it out tough. As I’ve mentioned before, despite living in a digital era, where all numbers are known, as more information becomes available, the amount of energy spent keeping the numbers secret increases. This phenomenon has not yet been given a name, but I guess we can call it the “Netflix Paradox”

Also, finding information about comics sales is almost as hard as finding comics sales numbers themselves, thanks to Google’s increasingly awful search and Twitter’s decaying orbit. If I’m missing something good, please let me know! 

Also, for the sake of historians, I am copying and pasting chart listings from other sources here. I usually only link back, but in this case, I felt it would be useful to have all the information in one place. Please do go to all the links and read the entire commentary. 

As far as analysis goes: The big story of 2024 was really the periodical bounce back – a return that was much needed, but effective. Just putting some good fresh talent with good ideas on beloved characters works, as you’ll see from the below. Absolute Batman #1 was an absolute hit, as were reworks of Ultimate Spider-Man, TMNT and GI Joe. Saga also continues to sell well, although it didn’t quite crack the Ulti-lute bulwark. 

Also I want to draw your attention to The Top 10 Best-Selling Manga of the year, published a few weeks ago at the Beat, led by Jujutsu Kaisen which sold a mere 7,610,995 copies. Also, Dean Simons has reported on France’s best sellers for 2024.  With that for comparison, let’s go to the charts! 

PRANA/MANAGE COMICS: First, let’s look at the new sales chart on the block, the rankings from Prana: Direct Market Solutions. These charts were announced with some fanfare at NYCC, a collaboration between Atom Freeman’s marketing company, Prana, and Brian Garside’s Manage Comics, a comics POS system. They have a sizable base of comics shops and customers to draw from, and base their charts on a metric they developed called the Fan Confidence Rating:

The Fan Confidence Rating (FCR) is a first of its kind Direct Market health indicator focusing on consumer demand for single issue comics solicitations. We have developed the rating from an ever growing list of comic shop point of sale system data using a logarithmic approach to normalize the data across all stores. This month’s data came from correlating reports received from 195 stores and 20,670 unique consumers.

So, as I often say when looking at these charts, it’s a metric. But consistent metrics are our friend in these dataless times. So far Prana’s rankings are only available in newsletter format, which you can (and should) sign up for here. The debut rankings gave a chart for periodical sales across 2024, showing the impact of the Ultimate/Absolute Revival:

In addition there are two charts for November 2024 sales:

Top 100 Single Issue Presales

Indy Top 25 (Non Big 3) Single Issue Presales

Here are the top ten comics periodicals for November, taken from the top 100 issues based on Consumer Copies (Subscriptions + Pre-Orders), in November 2024 solicits. 

ICv2 has also published their November 2024 sales charts, and here’s their November Top Ten for comparison (which I could only cut and paste in chart form.) These are based on sales via the ComicHub POS system.

As you can see, a lot of discrepancies here! Since this was the first Prana chart, they may have used a different time frame. To be investigated.  

Moving to all of 2024, I expect ICv2 to have their charts for the year out soon, but there has been some compiling already. 

Back in November, Popverse’s Chris Arrant tools a look at DC’s claims that Absolute Batman #1 was the best selling comic of 2024. There is a LOT of knowledgeable commentary from Arrant (including how Marvel’s numbers are the hardest to come by) here, which you should read, but he made some estimates, which I’ve edited down into a ranking: 

• Absolute Batman #1 (DC) – 400,000 (First printing 275,000)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 (IDW)  – 300,000 (includes 100,000 copies sold to WhatNot)
• Ultimate Spider-Man #1 (Marvel) – >300,000
• G.I. Joe #1 (Image/Skybound) –  225,000 

Of the Marvel numbers, Arrant notes:

Marvel Comics has been telling partners that 2000’s Ultimate Spider-Man #1 sold in excess of 20 million copies, but that number counts over a dozen reprints, non-English editions, and of course 24 years of selling.

ComicsHub’s Top 9 first printing sales only have also been compiled, with some caveats you can read about in the link.  

From these aggregates, we turn to more focused rankings. Several comics shops post their bestsellers at the end of the year, and these are hard to find (thanks Google) but I dug up a few. (Again if you made or saw one, email me or post in the comments.)

Our good friend Brian Hibbs at Comics Experience, traditionally posts his bestsellers, and here’s his 2024 list. The nut graph: sales were UP at the store! 

[H]ow did the store do in 2024?  Not too shabby!  We ended up 8% over 2023, which is a solid enough growth for a thirty-five year old business, I think.  I also hear from several of my SF peers that they’re still struggling to make the math work, so it appears we’re on the better end of the curve for the local market?  We’ve got quite a while to go to get back to our highest highs, but this was our best year since 2019, so we’re personally past the pandemic peak, which makes me hopeful.  I’ve lived through many up-and-down cycles of business since 1989, and I’ve yet to pull several of the ripcords I could, but what local small businesses in your area really need is your support! Me? I’ve got a pair of Graphic Novel-of-the-month clubs that make a real difference for us.  Did I ask you to join already?

When it comes down to what we’re selling, in 2024 63% of our sales were from new and used graphic novels. 35% were from periodical-format comics (including back issues). Almost 2% are from supplies (bags, boards, boxes, etc), while the last (under 1%) is from everything else. For our sales, 92% comes from credit cards — which means we’re only making ~98% of our stated sales there! That super sucks.

Here’s Brian’s Top 25 in periodicals and graphic novels – the latter list includes some local favorites at the top, Ai Wei Wei’s Zodiac and Eddie Ahn’s SF-based Advocate collection. But local stores have local hits. 

As you might expect, there is a lot more commentary and data crunching from Brian in the link, so please go read it.

The Big Planet chain (three stories in the Metro DC area) presented charts for all three stores. Again a preamble:

The theme this year was definitely the breakout hits of relaunched superhero comics, whether as new universes, or new storylines with new creators. DC Comics started the Absolute universe, with new takes on Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, while Marvel Comics restarted a new version of their Ultimate universe where there were no superheroes (at least at first). The X-Men wrapped up the years long Krakoa stories with new stories for all their characters. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles got a new start, too. And the Justice League finally reformed into a new team as Justice League Unlimited.

The lists are longer, but I’ll just run the Top Ten for each, some of which were chart toppers due to signings and other local factors. 

In my quest for data, I was able to find one more Hero Store that put out a ranking, Belfast, Ireland’s Coffee & Heroes, which tweeted out their Top 10 Pull List titles:

1. 1. Absolute Batman
   2. Ultimate Spider-Man 
   3. Absolute Wonder Woman
   4. Absolute Superman
   5. Batman
   6. Transformers
   7. Ultimates
   8. X-Men
   9. Detective Comics
   10. Old Dog

Old Dog! What is that? A spy book by Declan Shalvey that came out a few years ago, that had a one-shot in September. What was I saying about locals….(Shalvey is Irish.)

To round up a few more resources, John Jackson Miller still reports on reorders as reported by Diamond Comics, but with fewer publishers going through them, the data has become more scattered. All of his 2024 data can be found here. 

And finally, Image Comics has been putting out monthly sales charts since the summer. I missed reporting on a few, but I’ll be more regular about it in ‘25. Here’s their November Top Ten in both periodicals and GNs.  

I know these are a lot of numbers to dump on everyone on the first Monday following what (for many, including The Beat) was a two week holiday, but we deserved our break and now it’s time to jump back in! And of course, in a few weeks Brian Hibbs and our friends at Circana BookScan will start working on the epic Bookscan analysis for 2024. In the meantime, what do you think of these charts? Do you have some information to add? Let us know in the comments.