Tag: Sales Charts

Comics writer and armchair statistician John Jackson Miller was very, very excited by Diamond's decision to release year-to-year comparisons for their sales charts. While such maths make us go catatonic, in a blog post, he explains that this missing info has enabled a much more accurate view of comics' long tail -- and it's a healthy tail. In an email, he writes:

Diamond just released the top ten and market share reports for October and added comparative --monht to month and year to year -- charts for the first time. Paging Paul and Marc! The comparisons are not comforting but actually show graphic novel sales up 13% from a year ago. Superman Earth One was a big hit, and The Walking Dead Effect is supplanting the Watchmen and Scott Pilgrim effects.

A couple of developments in the ongoing pamphletpocalypse/sales adjustment. § At long last John Jackson Miller has appeared with comforting words to explain why September's sales figures weren't cause to jump out the window. This may be just our interpretation, but it appears that the plunge isn't so much that all periodical sales are shrinking as top periodical sales are slipping. Miller explains that the tail-end of the long tail is actually HEALTHIER than ever.

Every Friday, The New York Times presents its "graphic books" best seller list. It's compiled from BookScan, Diamond, and, as far as we can tell, magic juju algorithms of some kind. It is, like all best seller lists, probably a little subjective and magical, but it certainly reflects a stable metric of what books are selling briskly that week. Given all that we've talked about this week in terms of superheroes and literary comics and manga and what not...let's see exactly what is selling THIS week in American comics, with my own commentary.

August 2010 wasn't a great month for the direct market as a whole, and DC Comics was no exception. The current tent-pole title Brightest Day and its tie-in books kept performing solidly overall, but a number of other high-profile books, including Green Lantern, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, Batman and Robin and The Flash missed their August shipping dates, putting a bit of a dent in DC's periodical performance: Overall dollar sales for new comic books were the lowest since June 2009, and average unit sales dropped to their second-lowest point of the last 12 months. For the publisher's Vertigo brand, August was particularly tough, with estimated average unit sales dropping to a new all-time low of 9,094. Again, though, the schedule is the culprit: With American Vampire, Joe the Barbarian and Jack of Fables, some of Vertigo's best-selling comic-book titles didn't come out in August. At the WildStorm imprint, average unit sales crashed back to just above 6K, and in this case, the schedule had little to do with it. At this stage, it's not hard to see why DC is pulling the plug on WildStorm.

Overall, direct market sales for August were substantially down, prompting a bit of handwringing online. And it's true that no title even came close to reaching the 100,000 mark (for only the third time since Diamond achieved their monopoly of the direct market). It's not so much that sales on individual titles suddenly lurched down in August. They've been dropping for a while, and the comparisons with one or two years ago make fairly grim reading at the moment (though bear in mind they don't show books being cancelled and replaced by higher-selling new launches). Rather, it's a month without any really big releases from either company. Marvel's major launch was a new NAMOR series, which lands just outside the top 40, while the biggest story events were the X-Men/vampires affair and the Daredevil-centred SHADOWLAND. As usual, Marvel had the largest share of the direct market, leading DC by 45% to 32% in terms of units, and 41% to 28% in dollars.

It's fitting that September's top selling comic features an image of Wolverine crouching atop a giant turd, because overall, sales were in the crapper, and the whole quarter was in the dumpster, ICv2 tells us. If you think we're exaggerating, the normally understated ICv2's use of the word "Sucked" is a strong indicator.

The "Brightest Day" and Batman titles continued to be the driving force of DC's comic-book line in July. The publisher's overall performance in the periodical direct market remained more or less flat, consequently. The most prominent new release of the mainstream DC Universe line, and maybe a bit of a wildcard for retailers, was the debut of Batman: Odyssey, a six-issue miniseries by writer/artist Neal Adams, who is still something of a high-ticket name, but hasn't actually produced a substantial comics project in decades.

At Vertigo, overall sales were slightly down in July because Fables, for all intents the imprint's flagship series, didn't come out. At WildStorm, the numbers were slightly up because of two new miniseries debuting above the 10K mark.

See below for the details, and please consider the small print at the end of the column. Thanks to Milton Griepp and ICv2.com for the permission to use their figures. An overview of ICv2.com's estimates can be found here.

The business news website ICv2 isn't known for being hyperbolic. So when Milton Griepp said that this month's comics sales had "plummeted" everyone leaped up, screaming, knocking over chairs and spilling drinks everywhere.

Sales of comics and graphic novels through Diamond Comic Distributors dropped substantially in August with periodical comics falling 17% and graphic novels down 21%.  There wasn’t a single comic title even close to the 100,000 in August. 

If it weren't for the continued strength of SCOTT PILGRIM trades, the GN drop would have been even more grisly. On the periodical side, there was no big book, but, said ICv2, Certainly "the lack of one big title can’t account for everything." The grim details immediately set the punditocracy to arms, perhaps sniffing the hint of burning smoke in Tom Spurgeon's Doomapocalyptigeddon which he descried from his aerie high in the Misty Mountains, the same distant smell of charring paper and brimstone that we've been picking up for the last few weeks.

by Paul O'Brien The big launch for July is the new ongoing X-MEN series, which duly makes its debut at the top of the chart. Also this month, as the X-books' "Second Coming" crossover ends, the Daredevil-centred SHADOWLAND event begins. The Young Avengers return in AVENGERS: THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE. And from the Icon imprint, there's the debut issue of Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev's SCARLET. Needless to say, Marvel were once again the top company in the direct market, leading DC by 43% to 35% in terms of unit share, and 39% to 32% in dollars.

Vampires beat zombies this month, as the first issue of IDW’s new series based on the True Blood TV show is the top selling “indie” comic, beating an anniversary issue of The Walking Dead....

ICv2 posted their sales for July yesterday, but bucking a recent trend, periodical sales were down while GN sales were up a bit, mostly because so many Scott Pilgrim books were sold. Nut graph:...