Tag: Sales Charts

by Paul O'Brien Welcome to the calm before the storm. Or, in Marvel's case, the calm before more calm. September will all be about the DC Universe relaunch, and it's going to be a little while before the news cycle comes back round to anything Marvel have to announce. In the meantime, this month we have more "Fear Itself", more "Spider-Island", and the relaunch of the Ultimate imprint with ULTIMATE COMICS HAWKEYE and (ahem) ULTIMATE COMICS ULTIMATES. Once again, Marvel had the largest share of the North American direct market, leading DC by 42% to 35% in unit share and 37% to 31% in DC. Needless to say, it'll be a huge surprise if that holds up next month. Thanks as always to ICV2.com for permission to use these figures.

3.  FEAR ITSELF
04/11  #1 of 7 - 135,746
05/11  #2 of 7 - 105,359  (-22.4%)
06/11  #3 of 7 -  99,501  ( -5.6%)
07/11  #4 of 7 -  93,435  ( -6.1%)
08/11  #5 of 7 -  90,914  ( -2.7%)

Levelling out quite comfortably as the series goes on. I'll come to the performance of the tie-in issues later.

Here's a number for you: Out of 65 DC Universe comic books published in July, 32 were by the writer/artist creative teams listed in the solicitations -- less than half of the bunch. Most of the others were either completely drawn by guest artists or had help from one or more of them. And for a couple, even the story credit changed. Not counting the six DC Retroactive books, the video-game adaptations and the New Wave titles, none of which are involved in the day-to-day of the DC Universe, the strike rate is 22 out of 55. So, presuming that's not a coincidence, it looks like the big DC relaunch was about 40% well-planned, at this juncture.

Quite the busy month, July. FEAR ITSELF is still rumbling onwards, but it's now joined by two other events - the "Spider-Island" crossover, and X-MEN: SCHISM. And there are relaunches of DAREDEVIL, GHOST RIDER and CAPTAIN AMERICA (which spawns a spin-off into the bargain). Oh, and now that the FEAR ITSELF crossover arcs are firmly underway, this seems a good month to ask: is it really having much of an impact on sales of the tie-in books? As per usual, Marvel had the largest share of the North American direct market, leading DC by 44% to 35% in unit share, and 39% to 31% in dollars. Thanks as always to ICV2.com for permission to use these figures.

by Marc-Oliver Frisch The countdown to DC's big relaunch continued in June with a whole lot of Flashpoint tie-in books -- few of which seem to have stood out in any way to retailers, if the sales figures are any indication. Given that the upcoming relaunch titles are drawing on the same pool of creators, characters and concepts, that's not ideal for DC. If it's asking too much of readers and retailers to pick and choose among 16 titles of a certain mold, putting out 52 of them at once seems ill-advised. Over at the publisher's Vertigo imprint, meanwhile, almost half the current ongoing series are about to end within the next year. There's still plenty of time for Vertigo to announce replacements, certainly. But in combination with the recent WildStorm shutdown and the re-absorption of a number of key Vertigo properties into the DC Universe line, there seems to be a lot less patience than there used to be at DC for material that's not expected to immediately do well in the direct market.

Yes, yes, I know. June? It's August. This column is horrendously late. The July sales are already out. So I'm going to focus on the big events this month and otherwise keep the commentary pretty brief. Then we'll be back on track, the sun will shine, and everything will be lovely.

The big news in June is, of course, the death of a Spider-Man. (Don't worry, they've got a spare.) FEAR ITSELF continues to sprawl across the Marvel Universe line, and there's also the first issue of a new GHOST RIDER series.

As normal, Marvel had the largest share of the North American direct market, leading DC by 43% to 33% in unit share and 39% to 28% in dollar terms.

Eiichiro Oda's ONE PIECE continues to be the fastest selling comic book of all times, with the new Vol. 63 selling at a record breaking clip:

Eiichiro Oda’s “One Piece” manga continues its strong sales record with the latest volume 63 passing the 2 million sales mark just within 4 days of its release. This amazing result outshine the performance by Vol 60 & Vol 61 which only managed to pass the 2 million mark after 1 week.

A previous volume of ONE PIECE, #60, set another record by selling 3 million copies in an 8-day period.

Comics sales remained fairly soft in July, ICv2 reports with sales down a bit in dollars but nearly steady in units:

Spider Island and 1969 topped July's sales figures, just released by Diamond, with AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #666 topping the periodicals, and LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN CENTURY #2: 1969 topping the GN sales. Sales were down from 2010 and down sharply from June -- however, June was a five week month, and July only four. The overall market is down about 7% in both units and dollars for the year. IDW was the #3 publisher in dollars, while Image was #3 in units; DC has closed the gap against Marvel quite a bit from the dismal May that is what many say unleashed the relaunch plans. Tables, charts and more info below.

June was another down month, with periodical comics sales down 4.62 percent from June of 2010. The GN picture was more complicated. Overall, these numbers paint a pretty dicey picture for the Fantasy Economy. (See Larry Marder's comment's here). June 2010 may have been an abnormal month for GN sales but there is a need for more franchises like Hellboys, Chews and Narutos.

It was a great month for being ultimate, being afraid and flashing.

It's a mix of publishers at the top of the charts for the month of June, led by The Walking Dead and Buffy.

The indestructible beat of NARUTO led the way.