by John Jackson Miller, The Comics Chronicles
Special to Newsarama
Welcome to the first of what will become a monthly series of reports for Newsarama looking at the comics sales charts with a wider eye to where the market has been, and what that says about where we are today.
One of the things that surprised me when I first entered the comics scene professionally a decade and a half ago was the lack of publicly available information about comics sales. I had always been interested in comic-book circulation history going back to the days of seeing Statements of Ownership in the backs of comic books, and I imagined a sophisticated Nielsen Ratings-style flow of information between publishers, distributors, and retailers. What I found was that while there was data available, it was both divided across multiple distributors and inexact.
Milton Griepp (now of ICV2) had begun publishing indexed sales charts at Capital City Distribution in 1986, a practice later picked up by Diamond Comic Distributors — but those figures were always expressed as ratios, so retailers could figure out what their ordering levels of comic books should be relative to each other. I found retailers and even publishers themselves working complicated alchemies to guess at how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
In 1996, with Marvel distributing exclusively through Heroes World and Diamond the last full-line distributor standing, the direct market was down to two basic data streams. I began a monthly tracking report bringing together data from both sources, using actual sales figures from publishers to pinpoint (as best as possible) what the Diamond chart represented in terms of absolute copies ordered. I also looked at what the aggregate totals said, adding categories as Diamond increased its indexed reporting to include magazines, books, and an increasing number of trade paperbacks. The flow of data increased such that in 2003, I was able to begin generating estimates of Diamond’s overall sales to retailers.
I have continued to keep up with the tracking over the years, pursuing the research as a hobby interest after my days editing magazines and books ended. Having responded to literally hundreds of requests for data from students and reporters over the years, I have started the long process of archiving material on my research site, The Comics Chronicles, ranging from these continued monthly reports to Statements of Ownership from the 1960s. Now, having worked with the Newsarama team for years in various capacities, I’m pleased to have been asked to provide historical analysis here on a regular basis.
I hope to provide something a little different from the sales reports you typically have seen (many of which were probably my own). I recognize many readers are interested in sales charts as “horse-race data” between publishers; my real interest is in the race against the past. Comparative looks can show us how the comics market has changed, and just maybe, how it might be expected to change in the future. Not all signs are equally helpful — in following the market through the collapse of the 1990s, I was tempted to see a market bottom in 1998, when the direct market really didn’t begin to recover until the fourth quarter of 2000.
So I try to apply grains of salt where necessary, working to phrase statements so as not to go beyond what the data suggests: a collection of Diamond figures tells us what Diamond is selling to Diamond’s customers. I don’t always succeed — I do sometimes use the term “industry” for convenience when referring to the direct market comic shop market served by Diamond, when clearly there is a larger world out there. But while the measures available are imperfect (some of my discussions on this appear here.), they do have the capacity to tell us some interesting things about where the comics retail market has been, and, perhaps, where it’s going.
On to the January report…
January 2008
The direct market set the stage for a strong start for 2008 with January’s orders. Diamond’s final orders for all comic books, trade paperbacks, and magazines totaled approximately $36.7 million, an increase of 9% over the same month last year. Orders across the tabulated groupings:
Top 300 units: 7.18 million copies
Top 300 dollars: $22.33 million
Average cost of comics in the Top 300: $3.22
Average cost of comics in the Top 300, weighted by orders: $3.11
January was a month with five shipping weeks, and while publishers may well plan for five-week months by spreading out their offerings evenly, such months do have relatively more sales than months with four weeks. The extra shipment means an additional chance to receive reordered and late comic books, as well as extra trade paperbacks, less governed by such scheduling.
The first “Brand New Day” issue, Amazing Spider-Man #546, topped the chart with retailer orders of approximately 136,000 copies. (Yes, there are numbers in the tens and ones column in the charts below — but I tend not to use them often, as at that level we’re well into the margin of error. And rounding would add a step!) DC posted five Countdown to Final Crisis issues in the 69,000-74,000 range — again, a case where having the extra week helps, just as it helped the now biweekly Amazing Spider-Man to post three entries into the Top 10 this month.
Dynamite generated the highest non Marvel/DC debut in some years with Project Superpowers #0, landing in fourth with nearly 118,600 copies. (Note that I refer to Dynamite as Dynamic Forces in the table below — this is necessary label to keep the firm’s historical offerings together in my system.) Superpowers was a 99¢ special, putting its ranking in a somewhat different context, but Diamond has traditionally included dollar comics in its Top 300, going back to the days of Marvel’s Uncanny Origins and Gladstone’s Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories Penny Pincher in 1997.
It has varied its approach when it comes to including cheaper sampler comics on the list, beginning to tabulate those titles separately after the 10¢ issue of Batman and the 9¢ issue of Fantastic Four. Seventy-five cents now seems to be the cut-off for inclusion — that price belonging to Alias’s Lethal Instinct #1 in June 2005 and Superverse’s Zoom Suit #1 in April 2006.
DC had 95 offerings in the Top 300, versus 86 from Marvel. There were no publishers posting titles in the Top 300 that had not done so before.
On the trade paperback front, Ultimate X-Men Vol. 17 topped the list, with nearly 7,500 copies ordered. But even for a month with relatively fewer mammoth hardcover offerings than seen in previous months, Diamond’s top grouping of trades was up strongly in orders versus the same month in 2007:
Top 100 trade paperbacks: $4.67 million
Top comics plus top trades: $27 million
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Spider-Man Action Figures
Welcome to the first of what will become a monthly series of reports for Newsarama looking at the comics sales charts with a wider eye to where the market has been, and what that says about where we are today.
The first “Brand New Day” issue, Amazing Spider-Man #546, topped the chart with retailer orders of approximately 136,000 copies. (Yes, there are numbers in the tens and ones column in the charts below — but I tend not to use them often, as at that level we’re well into the margin of error. And rounding would add a step!) DC posted five Countdown to Final Crisis issues in the 69,000-74,000 range — again, a case where having the extra week helps, just as it helped the now biweekly Amazing Spider-Man to post three entries into the Top 10 this month.