The Comichron: The Blog of The Comics Chronicles

Blackest Night #7 tops February 2010 comics charts

2010-03-05T16:39:00.002-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

This time last year, the Obama inaugural issue of Amazing Spider-Man was doing something likely unprecedented for a single issue of a comic book by repeating in the top slot, two months in a row. That didn't happen this time out, but we did have another repeat of sorts: DC's Blackest Night, after a month with no new issue on the racks, retook the top position in February. Click to see the Top 10 comics for February 2010, released today by Diamond.

Every issue of the DC series has ranked #1 in comics shops for the month in which it was released. It's not the first time a series has had every issue top the charts with a one-month hiatus in the middle: as we can see here, the first seven issues of Secret Invasion consecutively topped the monthly charts in 2008 only to miss a month before Secret Invasion #8 closed out in the top position.

Marvel's Siege, which topped the charts in January, placed second with its second issue. Four of the top ten comics were priced at $3.99, with the rest at $2.99.

The latest Fables trade paperback by Bill Willingham topped the comics and graphic novels charts. On the market share side of things, the ranking was the same for both unit and dollar sales: Marvel, followed by DC, Dark Horse, Image, and IDW.

Diamond's full Top 300 tables and our estimates should be along in a few days.

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First Batman comic book tops three-day old record with $1,075,500 bid

2010-02-25T17:08:00.002-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

It's a strange week when you can say a million dollars being paid for a comic book isn't unexpected, but that's exactly how it's played out this week. When ComicConnect announced its private sale of Action Comics #1 for $1 million earlier this week, one industry observer I spoke with said it was likely timed to get in front of the scheduled close of an auction today by Heritage Comic Auctions for the first appearance of Batman in Detective Comics #27 (May 1939) — which the insider said was expected to become the first million-dollar comic book.

The 8.0 (Very Fine) copy of the first appearance of Superman indeed set the record as the first million-dollar comic book, but the copy of Detective #27 in the same condition now holds the record for highest price paid for a comic book. Today's auction closed for $1,075,500, which includes a 19.5% Buyer's Premium.

It's worth noting that these two sales represent appreciation over the initial 10¢ purchase price of 1 billion percent! There aren't many commodities that have appreciated to such a degree.

Which comic book is more rare today? CGC has graded more copies of Detective #27 — 45 copies, less than half unrestored, versus 42 for Action #1 — although since owners can remove books from their holders and resubmit them, those figures may not be representative of what's out there.

We are able to guess which book may have been more plentiful when it came out. Last year we reported on Audit Bureau of Circulation estimates for the Detective Comics Group for January 1939 — and as I noted, the May cover-dated #27 may well have come out in January. The Detective, More Fun, Adventure, and Action Comics issues for the month all added up to sales of 709,379 copies, so we're on our own to figure out which titles sold more than the others.

There are a few dynamics that we can observe from other titles that may advise us. First, in the 1950s, higher-numbered issues were generally more desirable to retailers, since they connoted longevity and an existing audience — but I'm not sure that dynamic was in effect in the late 1930s, when there weren't so many titles fighting for rack and shelf space yet. We see in Famous Funnies some declines as issue numbers increased, but that may also be attributable to the subject matter and the vagaries of that particular publisher's distribution. So it's not clear how the distributor draws — the number of copies distributors took to ship to newsstands — on a lower-numbered Action would compare to a higher-numbered Detective.

Comparing the numbering of the May cover-dated issues, we see which titles were around the longest:

• More Fun Comics #43

• Adventure Comics #38

• Detective Comics #27

• Action Comics #12

Adventure had begun as New Comics, becoming New Adventure and finally just Adventure as action comics came more into vogue; More Fun, beginning as the oldest DC comic book, New Fun, had dropped humor covers in early 1938. My sense is that probably the twelfth Superman outsold the first Batman despite Action Comics being a relative newcomer — and that the twenty-seventh Detective might have undersold longer-established More Fun and Adventure, meaning it'd have sold fewer than the 177,345 copies that an even four-way split may suggest. That's certainly not reflected in the number of issues found and graded for those books, of course, but nothing nearly as interesting as the debut of Batman went on in those issues of Adventure and More Fun!

It's all guesswork, to a great degree; the Audit Bureau simply didn't break out the individual titles. But there's not really room in the reported aggregate number for any of them to top a quarter-million copies, and my hunch is that 12 months was enough for even the glacially-responding newsstand market to recognize that Superman was a powerful draw. He'd have his own second title (simply called Superman) in a month or so after Batman's debut. So Action #12 very likely outsold Detective #27 — and my hunch is that Action #1 probably did, too. But today, in the aftermarket competition, Detective #27 has taken the prize — for now!

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Million-dollar Action #1 copy was once one-in-200,000

2010-02-22T19:41:00.006-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

I've observed here that the comics industry isn't so much "recession-proof" as it is insulated from external market forces. When things go very right — or very wrong — it's usually been due to internal factors. The reason the "recession-proof" term started to be associated with comics has nothing to do with new comics publishing at all — but, rather, the secondary market for truly scarce comics. And that, as we see with today's announcement of a $1 million private sale for Action Comics #1, seems to be showing its usual vigor in the face of broader economic problems. Where Superman's first appearance is concerned, money remains not much of an object.

The sale, brokered by Stephen Fishler and Vincent Zurzolo's ComicConnect.com (an affiliate of Metropolis Comics), involves a CGC 8.0 (Very Fine) copy of Action #1 that had been in a private collection for 15 years. And while it's probably not, as Zurzolo says, "the single most important event in comic book history” — the actual creation of Action #1 would be on a list of candidates for that — it's still pretty big news. An Action #1 in 6.0 (Fine) went for $317,200 last year; this is more than three times that. It's been known for some time there was a standing $1 million offer for the best-condition copy — and while this isn't quite the best copy, it's awfully close.

How long has a million-dollar offer been around? At least since the summer of 2001, when Richard Evans, owner of Houston's Bedrock City Comics, mentioned it at a forum on the aftermarket that I organized at Comic Con International: San Diego. "At some point," Evans said, "certain comics are going to reach a price ceiling where it they are going to become museum quality items. If the guy who owned the nicest Action #1 put it on the table, well, there’s already an offer of $1 million. I don’t think it would be any stretch of the imagination to believe that that guy’s offer is low." (The forum in its entirety appeared in Comics Buyer's Guide #1451.) Now, there's no telling whether the ComicConnect buyer is the same potential buyer mentioned back then, or someone else — but it's clearly not the first time Action's been picked as the first book to hit the $1 million mark.

The news release states that "only about 100 copies Action Comics #1 remain in existence, and of those 100, only two [including the one sold] have received a grading of 8.0." The CGC Census lists 42 copies of Action #1, including an unrestored 8.5 (VF+) and three restored copies above 8.0 (one 9.0 and one 8.5) — but restored copies are not generally as commercially desireable, and it's unclear whether the population report includes duplication due to comics being removed from their holders. That said, 100 existent copies overall sounds about right to me — my instinct is that even with this kind of high-profile book, probably as many copies are unslabbed and/or undiscovered as are graded by CGC.

How many copies of Action #1 originally existed? According to Audit Bureau of Circulation data detailed here, in January 1939, several months after Action #1 was released, all the issues on sale from the Detective Comics Group had combined sales of 709,379 copies. That group in that month for the ABC included four titles:

• Detective Comics • More Fun Comics • Action Comics • Adventure Comics

...and any issues that shipped that month would combine for the 709,379. Now, we can't really link up specific issue numbers to these titles, because the cover months and the auditing months might not be the same. But we know that at this time, all four books were monthly. So we're looking at a four-way split, and so by January 1939 — when, even with post-dated covers, Action probably would still have been in high single digit issue numbers, the title wasn't likely selling much more than 250,000 copies. Newsstand draws on the first issue likely would probably have been less, probably landing sales closer to 200,000.

This isn't to say that that many four-color lottery tickets are still out there — comics were notoriously disposable in those days, and interceding paper drives did away with many of our pop cultural artifacts. If anything, Action #1 is among the most hunted-for-and-found comics, so if the 100 copies figure is accurate, we're looking at a "survival rate" of 0.05% — and that's of copies in any condition. But there are reasons hunting for old comics remains an important part of our comics-collecting pastime — and stories like this are one of them. Comics are about reading, sure enough — but if you're headed to an estate sale, it doesn't hurt to bring along an Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide just in case...

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January 2010 comics sales steady, market up slightly overall

2010-02-21T16:07:00.005-06:00

by John Jackson Miller and T.M. Haley

Despite having the best-selling direct market comic book of the decade after reprints figured in -- the Obama appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #583 -- last January was a pretty bad month in comparison with January 2008. So this January didn't have a lot to live up to — and, indeed, it held its own against that month when it comes to periodical sales: retailers ordered essentially the same number of Top 300 comics. Marvel's Siege #1 topped the list in this month without a new Blackest Night issue.

And while the Top 300 trade paperbacks were down by nearly $1 million in sales year-over-year, once all comics, trade paperbacks, and magazines are accounted for, the market finished about $700,000 ahead, or up about 2%. View the January 2010 sales estimates here.

The aggregate totals appear below. Obviously, there is no separate “year-to-date” number this time:

TOP 300 COMICS UNIT SALES

January 2010: 5.62 million copies
Versus 1 year ago this month: unchanged
Versus 5 years ago this month: +13%
Versus 10 years ago this month: +1%

TOP 300 COMICS DOLLAR SALES

January 2010: $19.36 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: +1%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +39%
Versus 10 years ago this month: +36%

TOP 300 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES

January 2010: $5.25 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: -27%
Versus 5 years ago this month, just the Top 100 vs. the Top 100: +6%
Versus 10 years ago this month, just the Top 25 vs. the Top 25: +38%

TOP 300 COMICS + TOP 300 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES

January 2010: $24.61 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: -3%
Versus 5 years ago this month, counting just the Top 100 TPBs: +33%
Versus 10 years ago this month, counting just the Top 25 TPBs: +36%

OVERALL DIAMOND SALES (including all comics, trades, and magazines)

January 2010: $32.01 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: +2%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +37%

The average comic book in Diamond’s Top 300 cost $3.52, well shy of December's $3.59 record. The average Top 300 comic book that retailers ordered from Diamond cost $3.44. The median comic book price in Diamond’s Top 300 was $3.50, and the most common cover price on Diamond’s list remained $2.99.

Where did the direct market make up the ground it lost in the Top 300 trade paperbacks? There are a few possibilities. Last January’s report found that the Watchmen-powered frontlist was strong, but that the backlist was disproportionately weak; this year, the frontlist was relatively weaker and the backlist relatively stronger. There was also some greater degree of deep-discounting on trades and hardcovers by publishers to retailers this January, which would tend to boost the overall retail dollar total — although there was not nearly as much of this as in some months of 2009.

Another contributor was likely sales of comic books below the 300th place mark. That’s not generally a major factor, but with more prolific mid-sized publishers now in the mix, the titles ranking low on the list are selling more copies. The 300th place title in January 2010 had orders of 2,357 copies; a year earlier, that figure was only 1,612 copies.

The parity in Top 300 comic book unit sales would seem to suggest that the number of comic book accounts did not change significantly at the end of the year, traditionally the time when closures tend to be more likely.

Here's a look back at what was going on in previous years...

January 2009's top seller was Marvel's Amazing Spider-Man #583. While it turned out to be the top seller for the decade with estimated Diamond final orders of 530,500 copies, first-month orders were just above 352,000 copies. The issue, timed for Inauguration Day, resulted in four reprintings, each with their own distinctive variant covers — which contributed to the issue retaining the #1 spot in February.

Check out the detailed analysis of the month's sales here — and sales chart here.

January 2005's top-seller was Marvel's New Avengers #2 with Diamond final orders of more than 153,400 copies. This was the second consecutive month that New Avengers topped the rankings. Check out the sales chart here.

January 2000's top-seller was Uncanny X-Men #378, the first part of the "Ages of Apocalypse" storyline, with estimated Diamond orders of over 113,700 copies. Publishers slimmed down their slates of titles in the month, resulting in poor sales for the first month of the new decade. Preorder units and dollars for the top 300 comics were both down 9% from the year before, with preorders of 5.58 million copies and $14.28 million respectively.

Check out the January 2000 sales chart here.

January 1995 had a consensus top-seller at Diamond and at Capital City Distribution: Marvel's Amazing X-Men #1. Part of the original "Age of Apocalypse" storyline, Amazing X-Men was the title that replaced X-Men Vol. 2 for the four-month event. After the disastrous January of 1994 when 1,000 stores closed, the positioning of a major event for the "dead quarter" was a welcome change. (It would be repeated the following year, with "Marvel Versus DC."

At Capital City, Amazing X-Men had preorders of 92,650 copies, but advance reorders appear to have talen it to 127,600 copies, well over what the regular X-Men title had been averaging. Click to see the Capital City sales estimates for January 1995, which fuse known orders from Capital with the distributor's Top 600 list for the month. Capital's Top 600 comics preorders for the month amounted to 5.28 million copies worth $11.67 million. While that unit count is not far off what it is today, note that Capital alone reported having 3,500 accounts in that month — more than the entire direct market has currently. (Some of those 3,500 accounts may not necessarily have been full-line accounts — and it's unclear how old that reference was when it was printed.)

Diamond's sales for Amazing X-Men were likely closer to 170,000 copies, although only the Order Index numbers for Diamond are known. Check out the Diamond rankings for January 1995. All told, Amazing's sales were probably in the 400-500,000-copy range.

Comparisons between the distributors are difficult to make — while Capital and Diamond both published their rankings at the same time each month, one chart may have been prepared earlier in the month than the other. But we can see some interesting things. The average Top 300 comic book at Diamond cost $2.26; the average comic ordered from Diamond cost $2.20. When the next 300 items are added at Capital, the average comic book offered leaps up to $2.47 — independent titles were simply more expensive. But the average comic ordered from Capital wasn't much more expensive, only $2.21.

January 1990's top seller was Legends of the Dark Knight #5, concluding the "Shaman" storyline with orders of 126,200 copies at Capital City. Following the release of the Batman film in June 1989, Batman was on a roll; Batman was only ousted from the #1 spot in June. Other distributors and the newsstand likely brought Legends #5's sales closer to half a million copies.

January 1985 had Marvel's Uncanny X-Men #193, the 100th issue since the "new" X-Men reboot, as its likely top seller. This was the first non-Secret Wars month, and while Crisis on Infinite Earths had just started in the month before, the 12-issue maxi-series was still gaining steam. Amazing Heroes, the then-biweekly Fantagraphics magazine was running its own Top 100 list in this period; the January charts found X-Men #193 in first, followed by Fantastic Four #278 and then Crisis #2. Dave Olbrich, the editor during that time, told The Comics Chronicles the Amazing Heroes charts were based on unit sales a pool of retailers the magazine surveyed. The AH charts for December had Crisis #1 in fourth, behind Secret Wars #12, Web of Spider-Man #1, and the previous month's Uncanny X-Men issue.

When was Crisis #1 actually released? According to Comics Buyer's Guide #578 (the Dec. 14, 1984 issue), the issue shipped from printers on Dec. 11 and had a newsstand on-sale date of January 3, 1985. However, direct-market retailers usually received comics one to three weeks before the newsstand. Our own purchase records from comics shops in 1984 show DC comics available late in the week after the ship-from-printer date, so it's likely comics shops had Crisis #1 on the shelves by Dec. 20, for the holidays. Anyone remember?

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Comichron passes the billion-copy mark: All Diamond exclusive-era months now online

2010-02-18T17:16:00.001-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

When I launched The Comics Chronicles nearly three years ago, one of the major missions was to get all my earlier research into Diamond's monthly comics sales online. Now, with the assistance of T.M. Haley, that mission is finally complete. Estimates from every month, from September 1996 forward, are now online. That's 160 months of sales charts for comic books and trade paperbacks — and it brings the number of sales figures reported on the site well over 60,000.

Put another way, the Comichron charts now detail the sales of more than 1 billion comic-book copies, representing more than $3 billion in business to the industry. With the added information from Diamond's first-month sales of more than 12,000 trade paperbacks and what we know of Overall sales from 2003 to present, we have the detailed disposition of an additional billion dollars at full retail.

While some of those 60,000 items are reported more than once, they're reporting different sales. Blackest Night #1 makes the list in its initial month and in some reorder months, for example, but those are all sales of different copies.

The final batches of numbers added in our last update were from 2002, 2001, and 1998 — that last year in the news today with the announcement that Jim Lee and Dan DiDio had been named co-publishers at DC Comics. The biggest industry story of 1998, many recall, was Lee's departure from Image to join DC with his Wildstorm studio. It was an important move in DC's market-share race with Marvel — and it perhaps had a greater immediate effect on the standing of Image, which had previously posted dollar shares in the double digits on a regular basis. The publisher would later invite more creators with outside projects to join under the Image umbrella.

January 2010 estimates coming soon. Sorry for the delay, but we wanted to get the larger project done with...

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Hibbs presents 2009 Bookscan analysis

2010-02-14T23:35:00.001-06:00

Things are beyond busy here at The Comichron datafarm — but it's worth noting that Brian Hibbs has produced his annual analysis of graphic novel sales in the mass market according to Bookscan. It'll take some time for us here to digest the data and take a look at it beside the direct market, but in the meantime, it is interesting reading as always.

Winter strikes Diamond home offices

2010-02-08T12:19:00.009-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

The first Monday of the month is normally when the Top 300 lists are released — but against the great snowstorm, not even comics sales charts can stand. Power is out at the Diamond home offices in Timonium, Md., this morning, affecting all websites (including the Comics Shop Locator service), e-mail, and phone traffic, according to Cheryl Sleboda, Diamond's customer service manager for technical support. Sleboda writes on the Comic Book Industry Alliance forum that crews are working on the problem, and that Diamond hopes to reopen this afternoon.

The Memphis area, which has Diamond's huge Olive Branch, Miss., warehouse, has also seen several inches of snow this weekend, though no shipping problems have been reported. Winter 2010 has spared few corners of the comics universe!

Update: Dan Manser, Diamond's director of marketing, says Diamond's home office will not reopen today but will try again tomorrow (Tuesday the 9th). He also notes to the CBIA that the snow in Olive Branch may affect re-ships, some drop points, and customers serviced out of that location. The snow has not affected the drop points in Baltimore, although he notes that more is predicted.

Update #2: Manser reports that Diamond's website operations are back to normal. But the real-life challenges of shipping thousands of books across the continent every week were brought home by the news that the severe weather contributed to an accident involving a truck carrying comics to the Plattsburgh Distribution Center. "Unfortunately, this was major accident with two drivers hospitalized with serious injuries, and our thoughts and prayers are with each of them," Manser said on the CBIA forum.

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Siege leads off January 2010 top sellers list

2010-02-04T12:06:00.002-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

As a new decade dawned for comics shops, Marvel's Siege #1 was first off the UPS truck — and first in the preliminary rankings released by Diamond Comic Distributors for January orders.

Comics shops ordered more copies of the new Marvel event title in a month that did not see a new Blackest Night issue, breaking DC's string of months topping the list. Check out the complete top-sellers chart; this is, again, Diamond's preliminary release, so more will be coming later.

Marvel led the market shares, with DC in second and Dark Horse in third for both unit and dollar sales.

Walking Dead Vol. 11 topped the trade paperback and graphic novel list.

A final note: we've restored a research forum of sorts to the site. The earliest iteration of the site had a forum where readers could ask questions and post information they'd discovered; that vanished in the database crash of 2008, but we were able to rescue some of the more interesting posts and restore them to the new forum. It's a very no-frills message board — no memberships required — but hopefully it will allow readers to ask and answer on topic we don't get to in our blog.

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Of iPads and middlemen: 45 years of comics subscription sales data

2010-01-27T12:18:00.011-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

With Apple's iPad tablet product launching, much speculation surrounds what, if any, long-lasting impact the product and its like will have on the comic-book industry. Several efforts have been underway for some time to deliver comics electronically, and the addition of the new system has unsurprisingly generated much conversation.

The old issues about hard-copy-versus-virtual-copy are still out there, of course, and while I've written about them before, there is one area where The Comics Chronicles' focus on the past may be able to share some insight: subscription sales. One of the core attractions of online delivery for many is distribution — cutting out the trip to obtain the physical product. Subscription sales were the original and only channel for comics consumers looking to cut out that trip — and while any analogy with digital distribution has obvious flaws, we can at least see what consumer behavior has been over the years.

It's long been conventional wisdom that, contrary to the rest of the magazine industry, postal subscriptions for comics were a small sideline — maybe 5% at most of the business, even in the early days when comics were more widely available at newsstands. Looking at The Comics Chronicles' gigantic database of Statements of Ownership finds 1,459 statements with specific subscription sales data — and they show that postal subscription sales have always been in the single-digit range, percentage-wise:

The raw data appears here:

	Percentage sold through subscription
1963	2.4%
1964	5.6%
1965	0.8%
1966	0.7%
1967	1.3%
1968	0.4%
1969	0.9%
1970	0.4%
1971	0.8%
1972	0.6%
1973	0.5%
1974	0.7%
1975	0.9%
1976	1.0%
1977	1.6%
1978	2.3%
1979	1.8%
1980	2.5%
1981	3.1%
1982	3.8%
1983	4.9%
1984	5.1%
1985	4.5%
1986	5.0%
1987	3.8%
1988	4.1%
1989	3.9%
1990	3.3%
1991	3.7%
1992	2.7%
1993	3.5%
1994	4.2%
1995	4.8%
1996	5.8%
1997	4.2%
1998	4.0%
1999	3.3%
2000	3.6%
2001	4.4%
2002	3.0%
2003	4.4%
2004	4.9%
2005	5.6%
2006	7.5%
2007	3.8%
2008	5.4%

The first few and last few years are in red because there are many fewer data points in those years. In the early days very few titles broke out subscription sales; in more recent years, there have only been a handful of titles reporting data, and not all have been added to the database yet. Only Archie and Marvel among major publishers still report subscription sales via Postal Statements, and not for every title. There are no subscription offerings on a wide variety of titles, including many of the highest-profile ones; and DC has not reported sales since 1988, when it moved away from Second Class subscription sales to First Class, thus relieving it of the legal requirement.

Still, we do see a general increase in the percentage of comics sold by subscriptions, among titles with Second-Class of Periodical-Class permits. One reason is that a publisher that has a postal license to sell subscriptions is more likely to focus on selling them. That seems ridiculously self-evident, but it isn't tautological: There were many publishers a long time ago that had licenses to mail subscriptions simply as a matter of course — but they made no effort to sell them at all. The subscription statements of Gold Key, Charlton, and Harvey shows numbers of subscribers sometimes in the single digits! (Captain Atom, we see here, had 17 and 20 subscribers in 1963 and 1964 respectively.) As time went on, many of these publishers simply stopped offering subscriptions of any kind — meaning the ones left in the business were those more likely to be actually pursuing subscribers. The dabblers are no longer in there, bringing down the average.

To a degree, we might look an increase in the percentage of comics being sold by subscriptions as a statement of how difficult comics are to find in any one era. We see a spike in the late 1970s, as newsstand outlets go away and Marvel and DC work harder to sell subscriptions; that begins to abate in the mid-1980s when comics shops become more numerous and easier to find. The biggest bump — and, I think, once all the numbers are in, the true high-water mark — is in the mid-1990s, when publishers, particularly Marvel, hit direct mail pretty hard. This is the time when Marvel was working a list of millions of names gathered from its offers via Charleston Chew, canned foods, and various other offers; there are titles like Barbie and Barbie Fashion where the number of subscribers is way higher than the norm.

Still, while comics subscriptions are a significant portion of sales, they're well behind comics sold through comics shops and the newsstand — and always have been. What does that say about them — especially since, when you think about it, the comics shop model is in large measure a subscription model, in that a large part of retailers' businesses are in comics that are preordered on a monthly basis for customers with pull-and-hold folders? Why didn't those people simply have those comics delivered to the house, when the option was available?

As a subscriber to many comics in the 1980s who migrated to become a comics shop customer, the reasons were pretty simple:

1) Speed of delivery. My records of arrival dates from the 1980s (yep, I was keeping them as a kid!) show that the postal copies arrived on the order of two to three weeks after the comics shop received its copies. I don't know the extent to which that delay has changed over the years, but them as now, consumers wanted to get their comics as soon as they came out.

2) Damaged copies. While the Marvel subscription copies that I've seen from the 2000s came polybagged, copies in earlier years were less well protected. Marvel in the 1980s used the "plain brown wrapper" method, which led to scuffed corners and occasional damage from water or misplaced glue. Unlike magazine readers, customers for comics have tended to be relatively more interested in the physical condition of their reading material.

3) Pay-as-you-go versus pay-up front. Comics subscriptions require an up-front payment for the entire year, whereas the vast majority of comics shops charge customers only as the comics come in (and, to occasional retailer distress, only when the customer comes in, increasing the customer's control over payment scheduling). This is a pretty significant advantage.

While we can't know what a pay-as-you-go postal model from publishers would look like, there are mail-order comics houses that basically work as comics shops with home delivery. It would be interesting to learn what their scale is versus the traditional postal subscription share of the business.

4) The comics shop experience. In my own experience, my comics subscriptions lapsed the year after the time that I got a car — the mobility necessary to make regular comics-shop runs. (I have a fair stretch of duplicates from that era in my own collection as a result of that overlap period.) The comics shop addressed the first three needs listed above, but also offered additional experiences: exposure to other products, a social community, and additional education about the field.

For these reasons, postal comics subscriptions have tended to skew more towards younger readers — they're bought as gifts or in response to targeted direct mail offers, and received by people lacking the independent means to get to the comics shop regularly. That's a generalization, of course, but it seems to fit the data. Magazines may rely on subscribers to survive, but comics readers have always been willing to make the trip to purchase — enough, anyway, to keep the periodical model going for 75 years.

Comics subscriptions are, again, not likely to give us a lot of insight into how customers might approach any given digital alternative. Digital downloads certainly address the speed-of-receipt issue, provided releases are timed to comics street dates. They also resolve issues of damaged copies, although any readers regarding virtual versions as acceptable alternatives to printed ones are probably less likely to care, anyway. Pay-as-you-go is also addressed. The lack of the comics shop experience — well, that's another thing, and I imagine it becomes a matter of personal preference, just as the preference for digital or virtual comics is. In the end, I would guess that digital availability becomes an additional, complementary channel, not one that subsumes other parts of the model; as we've seen from the subscription history of comics, multiple distribution methods can coexist as long as they serve different needs.

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2009 end-of-year sales revised

2010-01-22T10:48:00.001-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

With more complete publisher information available, we've revised the final estimates for comics, trade paperback, and magazine orders placed through Diamond in December 2009 — and thus, for the entire year:

OVERALL DIAMOND SALES (including all comics, trades, and magazines)
December 2009: $35.67 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: -10%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +17%
4th Quarter 2009: $104.81 million, -9% versus 4Q 2008
2009 YEAR-END: Approximately $429.67 million, -2% vs. 2008, +30% vs. 2004

The small upward revision isn't enough to help 2009 catch up with 2008, but we are now almost in line with 2007. As noted in our end-of-year report and its comments section, there's a somewhat larger margin of error associated with the Overall statistic this year. The upshot remains: whatever happened at the cash register, retailers did not spend appreciably less building their comics inventories in 2009.

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Comics 2002: 1980s comeback, promos galore

2010-01-21T14:52:00.001-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

With the aid of research assistant par excellence T.M. Haley, we now have all the months of 2002 online here at The Comics Chronicles, as well as, for the first time, Diamond's end of year list for the Top 100 Comic Books and Trade Paperbacks for the year, which differs some from the monthly reports in that it includes reorders. 2002 was the last year that Diamond only reported preorder sales.

We can see one difference right away, in that the #1 comic book for the year was not actually the market leader in any individual month. Ultimates #1 from Marvel came in third place in January 2002 behind the last issue of Wolverine: The Origin and the second issue of The Dark Knight Strikes Again —but it only trailed by less than 20,000 copies, and as Ultimates was considerably less expensive than the other two books, it's not hard to see it surpassing them in eleven months of reorders. (The final total for the issue would likely be in the 200,000-copy neighborhood.)

2002 saw some very big things going on in the comics industry. Most memorably, May saw the release of the first Spider-Man movie and the staging of the first Free Comic Book Day, the origin of which discussed in detail here. In 2001, the industry had begun to mount a recovery from its seven-year recession, and these elements helped keep the fire going. "The industry is hitting on all cylinders," I had written at the time, noting that every major publisher had something big going on. Marvel had Spider-Man and the success of the Ultimates line; DC had Batman events at either end of the year, with Dark Knight Strikes Again and "Hush." Dark Horse had Star Wars Episode II — and Image and several other publishers had a piece of the year's most memorable direct-market phenomenon, the 1980s toy comic revival.

Beginning in earnest with a Transformers relaunch that put a company other than Marvel or DC atop the charts for the first time since the early 1990s, the wave included revivals for G.I. Joe, Thundercats, Masters of the Universe, and more. Many of the properties weren't very big in comics the first time around in the 1980s — but in 2002, it put Dreamwave solidly on the map, its market share rivaling that of Crossgen, which had built its share out of a larger line of titles. By early 2003, the fad had largely played out, but it gave the industry one more sales story for 2002 and helped the market finish ahead for the year.

Another phenomenon — and one of the reasons that 2002 took so long to post here — was the release of many giveaway and near-giveaway comics from the major publishers. There were the comics ordered for Free Comic Book Day, of course, but there was also Batman: The 10-Cent Adventure, and Marvel's answer, the nine-cent Fantastic Four issue. (There was also a 13-cent Gen13.) At the time, Diamond placed all of these in its Top 300 sales charts; while that practice later changed, it did leave some distortions in the unit sales market shares. For the listings here on Comichron, these promotionally priced items have been moved to the top of the list with asterisks, so they're not ranked; they have also been pulled from the aggregate unit sales counts, where the odd 700,000 copies really can throw things off.

With these additions, the number of sales estimates on the site has exceeded the 50,000 mark. Tables from 1998 and 2000-01 remain to be placed online in the next few weeks, at which point the entire Diamond exclusive era will be represented here. We also have more Diamond end-of-year lists to post. Coming soon!

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Top 500 Comics & Trades for 2009, with Comichron estimates

2010-01-12T11:50:00.002-06:00

by John Jackson Miller and T.M. Haley

Following up on our report on direct market sales for 2009, Diamond has released Top 500 charts for both comics and trade paperbacks for the year. Those charts appear here on Comichron, along with our own estimates for what each of those titles likely sold.

“Comic book and graphic novel sales through comic book specialty shops were extremely resilient in 2009, despite a down economy,” said Diamond CEO Steve Geppi in the news release, which also appeared prominently this morning in USA Today. “Overall, sales were almost on par with 2008 as publishers took great steps to create books that fans wanted to buy. We’re very optimistic for 2010, with some great projects already scheduled by publishers—and our annual Free Comic Book Day event on the first Saturday in May already shaping up to be a sales winner.”

Geppi's remarks about 2009's performance square up with Comichron's analysis of the year, which found that the direct market was down 2%. What's more, the releases of the Top 500 lists also reconcile nicely with our own tracking of where various issues should land, something we did a rougher version of in the comics of the decade chart. While Diamond did not publish indexes for these rankings — the yearly tables never have them — enough information about sales is known from past monthly rankings, actual publisher sales reports, and other sources to enable some educated guesses. Readers will find that the estimated final orders in the year for these comics exceed what was visible in the monthly charts; that's because we're making allowances for months in which reorders for items were not high enough to make the Top 300 lists.

The Barack Obama issue of Amazing Spider-Man led the sales chart, as we expected, with just over 530,000 copies sold in our estimation; Watchmen was the top trade with Diamond moving around 70,000 copies.

The analysis suggests the degree to which blockbuster issues contribute to the overall bottom line. The Top 500 comics combined sold between nearly 34 million copies, or almost 45% of all the copies sold in Diamond's Top 300 charts each month. Again: Of the 3,600 comics that Diamond reported sales for, the Top 500 comics accounted for almost half the copies sold. When we look at dollars, we fin that the Top 500 comics accounted for around $116 million in sales, or, again 45% of the dollars in Diamond's Top 300 each month.

The trade chart is also interesting. The Top 500 trades accounted for around 2.6 million copies sold, worth nearly $45 million. While this is 57% of the dollars that were reported in Diamond's 12 monthly Top 300 lists this year, the pie for trade paperbacks in the direct market is much larger; the Top 300 trades lists monthly capture only about half of the dollars sold. The Top 500 trades for the year probably are closer to 30% of Diamond's trade business.

Diamond also published year-end market shares, which also appear on our annual sales page; Marvel and DC's dollar shares were similar to what they were last year. Boom and IDW picked up a point in dollar shares.

This is the first year Diamond has published year-end rankings for 500 items; in previous years, the rankings have included only 300 comics or, in earlier times, just the Top 100. Those tables, like the one for 2007, are going online over the next little while.

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December 2009: Flashbacks to the Past

2010-01-12T10:42:00.001-06:00

by John Jackson Miller and T.M. Haley

Following the report on comics orders for December 2009, here's a look back at what was going on in previous years...

December 2008's top seller was Marvel's Secret Invasion #8, ending the series with orders through Diamond Comic Distributors of approximately 152,408 copies. Unit sales for December 2008 were up versus December 2007, but this boost was not enough to push 2008's year-end unit sales numbers past 2007's. Overall comics, trade paperback, and dollar sales were up slightly for the year.

Check out the detailed analysis of the month's sales here — and sales chart here.

December 2004's top-seller was Marvel's New Avengers #1 with first-month Diamond orders of over 240,700 copies. The title's launch capped a year of changes within the Avengers titles, including "Avengers Disassembled," and contributed to a 6% growth in overall comics, magazine, and trade paperback sales over the previous year. Trade paperbacks saw a large boost in their sales numbers from the prior year, with growth of 29%. Check out the sales chart here.

December 1999's top-seller was Marvel's X-Men #97, with orders through Diamond of more than 117,400 copies, topping both Uncanny X-Men #377 and the previous month's number one, Tomb Raider.

Sales of Diamond's top-selling trade paperbacks were up a whopping 102% in December, thanks largely to the JLA Earth 2 hardcover; at $24.95, it saw first-month orders of more than 22,000 copies. Strong trade paperback sales kept December from posting a sales deficit, as comic sales were down 6%. Still, 1999 was slightly down overall for the year.

Check out the December 1999 sales chart here.

December 1994 once again had a consensus top-seller at Diamond and at Capital City Distribution: Marvel's X-Men: Alpha #1 (actually, X-Men #A), launching the "Age of Apocalypse" storyline that led the industry in the first quarter of 1995. During the storyline — a definitive example of an "icebreaker" event crafted to enliven sales in the usually slow "dead quarter" — the regular X-Men titles went away for four months, to be replaced by series in a variant timeline. (Amazing X-Men replaced X-Men, Astonishing X-Men replaced Uncanny X-Men, and so on.)

Capital's orders for the $3.95 X-Men: Alpha amounted to 127,225 copies, putting overall sales in the 400,000-copy range. Alpha's acetate cover, incidentally, makes it one of the most difficult comics to photograph!

December 1989's top seller was Legends of the Dark Knight #4, with orders of 125,500 copies at Capital City and overall sales likely north of half a million copies. It was the end of a strong year of recovery for the industry following the black-and-white comics glut and crash a couple of years earlier.

Finally, December 1984's top comic book was Marvel Super-Heroes Secret Wars #12, ending the series with twelve consecutive months in the number one slot.

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Comichron Analysis: Comics end 2009 down 2% overall

2010-01-11T21:18:00.006-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

Comic book sales showed some resilience against the recession in 2009, based on The Comics Chronicles analysis of data reported by Diamond Comic Distributors. We're still bringing together all the information needed for December, so the figures posted here may require some further adjustment, but it appears from our initial estimates of comics ordered in December 2009 by comics shops that the direct market was off by only about 2% in 2009, or less than $10 million dollars. It's the first down year overall since 2000, breaking a remarkable run — but given general economic conditions, the potential for a larger drop was clearly there.

December, specifically, was an off month across all categories, squared up as it was against a mammoth December 2008 that featured a whopping 119 Marvel titles in the Top 300 comics. This December Marvel again had a large impact on the charts, with 111 titles making the list, but unit sales were lower by more than a million copies overall.

In a new move for December, Diamond did not slate new comics for shipping in the fifth week of the month. It's not clear how this affected sales levels across the board, but it does seem to have coincided with smaller slates making the Top 300, with Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, and IDW combining for 242 slots this year, as opposed to 267 slots last year. In a first, Boom Studios had the third largest number of entries in the Top 300 comics. Last December the 300th place title had orders of 4,607 copies; this year, the figure was 3,403.

It's also not clear what effect that had on orders of trade paperbacks and graphic novels, except to say that the string of poor year-to-year performances continued in this category, with dollar orders of the Top 100 trades off by nearly a quarter. The result was that while trades have helped the direct market escape down years in other months of the decade, it wasn't to be in 2009. Orders of Diamond's Top 100 trades each month were down 15%, or nearly $10 million, versus a strong 2008 total; by contrast, Diamond's Top 300 comics orders were only off 2% year-over-year in dollar terms.

As a result of December's orders, overall comics shop orders of comic books, trade paperbacks, and magazines for the year look to have landed around $428 million, near 2008 and 2007's totals of $436.6 million and $430 million respectively. It's likely a further loss when figured against inflation, which was a significant factor in the comics market this year; the year closed with the highest average prices for new comic books in history: $3.59, beating the old record by several cents.

The aggregate figures:

TOP 300 COMICS UNIT SALES

December 2009: 6.31 million copies
Versus 1 year ago this month: -18%
Versus 5 years ago this month: -3%
Versus 10 years ago this month: -4%
4th Quarter 2009: 18.66 million copies, -11% versus Q4 2008
2009 YEAR-END: 74.88 million copies, -8% vs. 2008, +1% vs. 2004, -4% vs. 1999

TOP 300 COMICS DOLLAR SALES

December 2009: $22.49 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: -11%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +19%
Versus 10 years ago this month: +28%
4th Quarter 2009: $65.55 million, -6% vs. Q4 2008
2009 YEAR-END: $257.88 million, -2% vs. 2008, +21% vs. 2004, +27% vs. 1999

TOP 300 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES

December 2009: $5.25 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: -24%
Versus 5 years ago this month, just the Top 100 vs. the Top 100: -22%
Versus 10 years ago this month, just the Top 25 vs. the Top 25: -6%
4th Quarter 2009, just the Top 100 vs. the Top 100: $11.61 million -28%
2009 YEAR-END: $77.65 million; -15% when just comparing just the Top 100 each month

TOP 300 COMICS + TOP 300 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES

December 2009: $27.74 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: -14%
Versus 5 years ago this month, just the Top 100 vs. the Top 100: +11%
Versus 10 years ago this month, just the Top 25 vs. the Top 25: +26%
4th Quarter 2009, just the Top 100 vs. the Top 100: $82.81 million, -10%
2009 YEAR-END: $335.47 million; -4% when just comparing just the Top 100 each month

OVERALL DIAMOND SALES (including all comics, trades, and magazines)

December 2009: $34.2 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: -14%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +13%
4th Quarter 2009: $103.3 million, -10% versus 4Q 2008
2009 YEAR-END: Approximately $428 million, -2% vs. 2008, +30% vs. 2004

Diamond also released a Top 25 Small Publisher list that added two data points just below the Top 300.

The average comic offered in the Top 300 cost $3.59; the average comic ordered cost $3.57. Both are, as mentioned, records. The median price — the middle price of all 300 comics — was $3.50. $2.99 was again the most common price of comics appearing in the Top 300. The average comic book ordered by retailers in 2009 cost $3.44, an increase of 19¢, or 6.8%; this is the largest year-to-year increase in the Diamond exclusive era, which began in 1996.

Again, there may be some revisions ahead as we refine our estimates — and changes have already been made to the top comics of the decade chart, as Blackest Night #1 and other 2009 issues have racked up more sales. The Overall figure is also a little fuzzier this year because, as has been written in several past market reports in 2009, the year saw several deep-discounting promotions where graphic novels worth several millions of dollars at retail entered the sales stream near or below publisher cost. Our estimates have included adjustments to the overall figures for purposes of fair comparison, so in fact the dollar value of books entering the direct market retail stream is slightly higher than that reported above.

Finally, it's important to remember that the figures represented here account for only a portion — though the largest one — of North American comic book sales. Bookstore sales of collections, which should be known soon for 2009, are expected to contribute another couple hundred million dollars — and there are also relatively smaller amounts that come from newsstand and subscription sales of comics. It's possible that those combined could push the year ahead, but we rarely know the figures with enough exactitude to say.

What's ahead? While January has been the first part of a historically weak quarter for the industry, there are a number of what Comichron calls "icebreakers" slated for the period, such as Marvel's Siege, which launched the first week of the year. There have been a number of strong winter events over the last decade and a half in comics; we'll see if there's enough ammunition out there to prevent the usual slow start to the year.

The monthly Flashbacks column will follow shortly — and Diamond's 2009 Top-Sellers and Market Share charts are expected soon as well. Stay tuned!

Update 1/13: Brian Hibbs reminds that Diamond's warehouse move resulted in erratic reporting starting in the first part of the year, something we relayed at the time. It's unclear, according to Brian, how many orders were ultimately unaccounted for during the change; possibly enough to move the needle and change the outcome for the year. Publisher data available to Comichron doesn't suggest much missing, but as Brian says, the error may not be present equally in all publisher's stocks.

These things always have some margin of error, so we might consider that this year's could be larger than most — as noted above, it already is, thanks to the amount of deep-discounted material retailers ordered.

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Diamond year-end rankings now being added

2010-01-10T23:02:00.002-06:00

by John Jackson Miller and T.M. Haley

With Diamond Comic Distributors soon to announce its 2009 year-end sellers and market shares, The Comics Chronicles is also beginning to post some of Diamond's year-end tables from previous years, beginning with 2007. More years will be soon to follow. Some years have a full 300 entries; earlier ones have fewer. But all show something we can't see just from looking at the monthly comics reports, because the year-end tallies include all reorders that individual comics and trade paperbacks garnered throughout the year.

2007, as the link shows, was the year that featured the end of Civil War, the death of Captain America, and World War Hulk. Thanks largely to these titles, Marvel took the #1 spot on Diamond's Top 300 all twelve months of the year. These sales contributed to the year's 9% increase in overall sales over 2006.

Since Diamond does not provide indexed figures with its year-end reports, these tables are simply rankings without estimates. The end-of-decade page does feature aggregated unit sales estimates for several of the highest-ranking issues, but, again, since not all months of reorders appear in Diamond's Top 300, those figures are slightly lower than the actual numbers of copies shipped.

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December 2009 Top Sellers: Blackest Night finishes year on top

2010-01-07T20:45:00.001-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

Diamond Comic Distributors has started its roll-out of sales charts for the final month of 2009, and Blackest Night has again topped the list of comics ordered by comics shops. The sixth issue of the series joins several other DC "Blackest Night" spinoffs on the Top 10 list, seen here.

DC also topped the trade paperback list with the eighth reprint collection of Ex Machina.

Marvel approached 50% of the units sold in the direct market, including comics and trade paperbacks; in dollars, the gap between Marvel and DC was narrower.

The release of the December information allows a complete look at what happened to dollar market share for the major publishers for the decade. The long track can be seen below; click here for a more detailed track of recent months.

If the schedule runs as usual, the Top 300 release should follow early next week; The Comics Chronicles estimates will soon follow. There should also be composite end-of-year tables from Diamond; last year's came out on January 12.

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Marvel Age of stock reports ends; Disney buyout approved

2009-12-31T15:23:00.003-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

And now, here at the end of the year, a last little bit of comics history: Disney shareholders approved the purchase of Marvel Entertainment for $4.3 billion. The Associated Press reports that Marvel shareholders will receive $30 per share in cash, plus 0.745 Disney shares for every Marvel share they own. Given Disney's value, the AP calculates that values Marvel shares at $54.25. The final settle, for the record, was $54.08.

Up fast in the early 1990s; down to destruction in the second half, and right back up again. The old ticker symbol, MRV, is since retired. I suspect the charts and data will be offline eventually; in the meantime, here's Yahoo Finance's look at the history just ended:

And that's about it for our ability to track comics industry companies based on stock market filings. In its two publicly traded incarnations — separated by bankruptcy — Marvel's reports were themselves collectibles, and showed detail on its publishing operations that will likely be harder to come by in Disney filings.

Motley Fool, which has provided heaping gobs of Marvel analysis over the years, says goodbye to the stock with a look back and also suggested ways Disney could use Marvel's properties to get ahead. "Pixar can render Marvel properly," suggests Rick Munarriz. "Animated treatments of some of Marvel's more obscure franchises will help Marvel, in turn, reach younger audiences, ideally without alienating its fan base." (Is Devil Dinosaur and Moon Boy around the corner?)

Anyway, it's been a long ride since that first public offering in 1991: Our own Marvel timeline has just been updated. For more about Marvel's stock history, check out Dan Raviv's detailed tome, Comic Wars: Marvel's Battle For Survival.

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Comichron Presents: Top 300 Comics of the Decade in comics shops

2009-12-30T13:24:00.005-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

The Barack Obama commemorative issue of Amazing Spider-Man was the comic book ordered most by comics shops in North America in the decade of the 2000s, according to analysis by The Comics Chronicles.

Comichron looked back at 119 months of comic-book orders reported by Diamond Comic Distributors, the exclusive retail agent for the largest publishers in the industry. Sales from these months are posted individually at the site (except for a few remaining to be posted from the early years of the decade); it's not 120 months because the December 2009 figures have not been released yet by Diamond. The tables report Diamond's Top 300 comics from each month, as well as the number of copies ordered by its approximately 3,000 retail accounts; the figures represent final orders beginning in February 2003, and preorders before that. Since many comics reappear on the list several times due to reorders; all reorders for the same comics were combined to form a listing of the 300 comic books most ordered by retailers in the 2000s.

The ten comic books with the most comics shop orders in the decade are as follows:

1) Amazing Spider-Man #583
    Jan-09 • Marvel • at least 524,914 copies ordered

2) Civil War #2
    Jun-06 • Marvel • at least 341,856 copies ordered

3) Civil War #3
    Jul-06 • Marvel • at least 337,025 copies ordered

4) Civil War #1
    May-06 • Marvel • at least 328,524 copies ordered

5) Captain America #25
    Mar-07 • Marvel • at least 317,713 copies ordered

6) Civil War #4
    Sep-06 • Marvel • at least 290,994 copies ordered

7) Civil War #5
    Nov-06 • Marvel • at least 283,863 copies ordered

8) All Star Batman & Robin #1
    Jul-05 • DC • at least 276,017 copies ordered

9) Civil War #7
    Feb-07 • Marvel • at least 274,451 copies ordered

10) Infinite Crisis #1
    Oct-05 • DC • at least 269,991 copies ordered

These figures are for the comic book direct market only — the network of comic book stores that sell the lion's share of comic books in periodical form in North America. Sales of these comics on newsstands or by subscription are not included. But quite a lot of information is revealed in this data. All the Top 10 comics of the decade topped the quarter-million copy mark, and all the Top 300 of the decade topped the 100,000-copy mark. Notably, all ten top comic books come from the second half of the decade, underlining the degree to which the industry recovered from its turn-of-the-century nadir.

Apart from the inauguration day commemorative issue of Spider-Man which set off a collecble frenzy early in 2009 with its multiple variants and reprintings (you can see some of the versions, and what they're going for, here), the top of the list is dominated by Marvel's Civil War, a limited series that served as the anchor for the decade's most popular linewide cross-over event. (Civil War #6 is the only issue not to make the Top 10, and that placed 11th.) Civil War #2 and #3 nudged past Civil War #1, reflecting that retailers had seen demand on the series' first issue and had time to boost their orders for later issues. Reorders and reprintings of Civil War #1 continued to sell throughout the year, however, and the issue made Diamond's Top 300 chart in seven consecutive months. The same thing happened with DC's Infinite Crisis #1.

It's possible that Civil War #1 did indeed surpass the later issues, because the figures cited above only account for the sales of issues in the months in which they made Diamond's Top 300 list. The bottom item on the list varied throughout the decade, as seen here, so sometimes it took several thousand copies sold for an item to reappear on the list. As noted, much of Civil War #1's sales life cycle is represented on the table, but there are bound to be months for all titles where reorders for them were "bubbling under" the Top 300 and thus out of sight for tracking purposes.

Only five publishers are represented in the Top 300 list for the decade. Marvel had the most entries, 186; DC had 102 comics on the list. Dreamwave had seven entries, all Transformers issues from that company's brief time on the shelves. Transformers: Armada #1 placed highest, at 128th. Dark Horse had three issues on the list, all from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer Season 8. #1 was Dark Horse's top performer on the chart, at 111th place. Image had two issue on the chart, led by Spawn #100 in 137th place. No other publisher pops up until Dynamite, with Red Sonja #1 landing around the 1,200th place mark. Archie shows up with its 600th issue landing around 3,000th place, and IDW also makes its first appearance in the 3,000s.

Note that since December 2009 isn't in yet, these rankings could change slightly; certainly, Blackest Night issues will move further up the list. The first issue is already up to 29th with reorders reported by Diamond to date. Looking at what we have, though, we can easily see where the strength is in the decade by looking at the number of Decade Top 300 entries by year:

2000: 5
2001: 22
2002: 16
2003: 23
2004: 40
2005: 41
2006: 63
2007: 58
2008: 19
2009: 13

Not unexpectedly, the hits cluster right around the Big Event heyday, the period that gave us Civil War and Infinite Crisis. There was also the weekly 52 phenomenon, which added many entries.

One reason comics from the early decade are less represented is that before January 2003, Diamond did not report reorders, so those issues are at a disadvantage. However, looking at known reorder rates from when Diamond did begin publishing the data, reorders are unlikely to shuffle the list dramatically. The industry was still coming out of the seven-year recession of the 1990s, and few titles were selling over 100,000 copies.

Items on the table are listed in the months in which they first made the Diamond chart — following the links to the individual months' pages shows what those comics sold initially, since later reorders pop up in the months that follow. It's interesting to see what months had the most hits:

January: 20
February: 17
March: 20
April: 23
May: 36
June: 34
July: 34
August: 29
September: 25
October: 17
November: 20
December: 25

Comic books have historically been a summer-dominated business, and while that is reflected here, there's a more even distribution than we might have found in previous decades. Hits, increasingly, can happen in any season, providing strong enough material is slated for it.

A few more words about what's on the list — and what isn't. Orders for variant editions and reprintings of comic books were combined if those versions were essentially the same product — that is, same physical configuration, same interior, and same cover price. This rolls up most of the snap-reprintings into the same entry, but disallows items like "Director's Cuts" or the Marvel Must-Have editions, which are in many respects distinct products.

And, importantly, the list above focuses on comic books sold at full, and not promotional, prices. The Diamond lists have, in the past, included a number of comic books offered below publisher cost: Fantastic Four Vol. 3 #60, priced at 9¢, had preorders of 752,700 copies in August 2002. There are many such examples of free or promotionally priced comics; Diamond made the decision a few years ago to no longer list low-priced comics, and that move has been followed with this list to guarantee comparisons of like items.

Since comics shops are the focus of this list, it also does not include a number of other highly circulated comics. Gears of War #1 didn't make the Top 10,000 comics of the decade in comics shops, but it garnered attention for its strong circulation through game stores in 2008. Unfortunately, as with newsstand sales, not a lot of specific numbers are available from the video game trade; and much circulation in outside channels is promotional, rather than sold. (In the Gears case, Gamestop managers reported offering it as a giveaway to customers preordering video games, but it's unclear what portion of circulation free or "bonus" copies represented.) The game market is a new channel with comics circulating in a number of different manners (for disclosure purposes, I note my own Mass Effect: Redemption #1 has a variant in January's Mass Effect 2 Collector's Edition) but it is as yet unclear how to integrate this sector's information for purposes of comparison, were it to become available.

Again, this is only for the comics shops — and because not all reorders make the list every month, any decade ranking released by Diamond would differ somewhat. And as this is a periodical ranking, it doesn't get into the sector that brought the most new money into the business in the 2000s, bound collected editions and graphic novels. But it's an interesting snapshot. How do the 2000s compare with other decades for comics? Probably not spectacularly — only a handful of the charting issues would make a similar chart for the speculator-mad 1990s. But, as just noted, comics are not just about periodical sales any more, with stories reaching readers in more ways than ever.

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Flashbacks to the Past: November 2009

2009-12-28T15:05:00.002-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

Following the report on comics orders for November 2009, here's a look back at what was going on in previous years...

November 2008's top seller was Marvel's Ultimatum #1, with first-month orders through Diamond Comic Distributors of approximately 114,200 copies. It was the slowest month of the year, unit-sales wise; Marvel's Secret Invasion had ended the month before. Perhaps bigger news was that comics were more expensive in November 2008 than in any month in history to that point. The average comic book offered in Diamond’s Top 300 comics had a cover price of $3.50, beating the previous record (itself only a month old) by 12 cents.

November marked a number of changes from Diamond in its reporting, as the company began releasing Top 10 lists several days before the larger data rollout; it also began listing the Top 300 Trade Paperbacks for the first time, bringing that list into parity with the comics list. Check out the detailed analysis of the month's sales here — and sales chart here.

November 2004's top-seller was DC's Superman/Batman #13, another of the new Supergirl issues, with first-month orders of nearly 158,000 copies. With Identity Crisis and "Avengers Disassembled" still running, aggregate periodical sales were slightly up over the previous year; trade paperbacks, however, were significantly down (much like November 2009). Check out the sales chart here.

November 1999's top-seller was Image's Tomb Raider #1, ending the ten-month run of Uncanny X-Men in the top slot. Lara Croft's comics debut had first-month preorders through Diamond of more than 189,400 copies.

A different video game, however, was driving most of the new traffic to specialty stores: The Pokémon Trading Card game fad was near its absolute peak. (Personal note: In the middle of the month, Krause Publications, recognizing the craze, purchased Scrye magazine, naming me editor.) Retailer Garrett Anderson, manager of A-F Books of Tinley Park, Illinois, told Comics Retailer magazine that questions about the game had worn him out. "I long for the days when the typical question was something like, 'Who would win in a fight, Flash or The Hulk?" he said. "Still, it's better than 'What's a good comic book to buy that will one day be valuable enough to pay for my kids' college bills?'"

Check out the November 1999 sales chart here.

November 1994 had a consensus top-seller at Diamond and at Capital City Distribution: the deluxe version of Marvel's X-Men #40. Capital's orders were 95,575 copies; overall sales of the issue, including newsstand and subscription copies, were in the mid-300,000s.

Again, the big news story in most comics shops wasn't comics, but Pokémon's trading-card game precursor Magic: The Gathering. The beginning of the end of the initial craze had begun, with the November release of the Fallen Empires expansion — a bomb with most players, and, as the first set with widespread mass-market distribution, the first where supply was sufficient to fill all orders. Retailers who had over-ordered speculating they would only get a small allocation found themselves buried under product. (One, accustomed to receiving only 10% of his Magic orders, ordered 550 display boxes, ten times what he needed — only to receive them all, at a loss to him of tens of thousands of dollars.)

November 1989's top seller was Legends of the Dark Knight #3, with orders of 126,900 copies at Capital City. Overall orders were likely over half a million copies. The buzz had faded somewhat from the speculator summer (first of a series); Capital reported in its magazine that "the fall of 1989 seems to be developing as a period of a 'soft fall landing' for the comics market after extremely robust growth.'"

While Legends had the numbers, more money was definitely brought in by the first Elseworlds title, Gotham by Gaslight. At $3.95, the squarebound title with art by Mike Mignola and P. Craig Russell had orders of nearly 100,000 copies at Capital alone.

Finally, November 1984's top comic book was Marvel Super-Heroes Secret Wars #11, marking eleven straight months with the limited series in the top slot.

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November 2009 comics sales help market close gap with 2008

2009-12-28T00:31:00.002-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

Comic book orders in direct market gained some ground in November, led by strength in the periodical market, according to The Comics Chronicles analysis of data released by Diamond Comic Distributors. The estimates appear here.

This is the first month for we can do year-to-year comparisons on the full Top 300 Trade Paperbacks, which Diamond began reporting last November, and we see from them that trade paperback orders were down considerably — but the periodical market made up for it. Last November was the weakest month of the year in Top 300 Unit Sales — many important titles being delayed until December — so this year’s performance looked that much better by comparison. This November also included DC’s rings promotion for Blackest Night, tying ring purchases to orders on specific titles.

Overall, the direct market to date in 2009 is running just slightly behind 2008 — we’re down $3 million for the entire year, or less than 1%. The gap was more than $5 million last month, so ground has been closed. However, as noted, December 2008 was a blockbuster, with many delayed titles shipping along with regular monthly issues, so it seems unlikely that the industry will close much ahead.

The aggregate figures:

TOP 300 COMICS UNIT SALES

November 2009: 6.15 million copies
Versus 1 year ago this month: +7%
Versus 5 years ago this month: -4%
Versus 10 years ago this month: -8%
YEAR TO DATE: 68.57 million copies, -7% vs. 2008, +1% vs. 2004, -4% vs. 1999

TOP 300 COMICS DOLLAR SALES

November 2009: $21.56 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: +12%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +16%
Versus 10 years ago this month: +23%
YEAR TO DATE: $213.81 million, -1% vs. 2008, +21% vs. 2004, +27% vs. 1999

TOP 300 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES

November 2009: $6.12 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: -29%
Versus 5 years ago this month, just the Top 100 vs. the Top 100: +10%
Versus 10 years ago this month, just the Top 25 vs. the Top 25: +54%
YEAR TO DATE: $72.4 million; -17% when just comparing just the Top 100 each month

TOP 300 COMICS + TOP 300 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES

November 2009: $27.68 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: unchanged
Versus 5 years ago this month, just the Top 100 vs. the Top 100: +15%
Versus 10 years ago this month, just the Top 25 vs. the Top 25: +25%
YEAR TO DATE: $295.11 million; -4% when just comparing just the Top 100 each month

OVERALL DIAMOND SALES (including all comics, trades, and magazines)

November 2009: $34.95 million ($38.9 million with UK)
Versus 1 year ago this month: +6%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +21%
YEAR TO DATE: $393.8 million, -1% vs. 2008, +32% vs. 2004

Chew Vol. 1 was the top-selling trade paperback.

Diamond also released a Top 50 Small Publisher list that added a number of data points, down to Archie in 359th place. The inclusion of 21 additional comics adds 39,000 units to the list, selling for $136,000. These have been included in my charts, but not counted toward Top 300 sales for comparison purposes. However, it does give us a good look at what portion of comics sales are "bubbling under" the Top 300 list, a topic explored previously here.

The 359th place title had direct market orders of around 1,260 comics, less than half that of the 300th place title. These extra data points show a sales slope that drops fairly sharply beneath 300th place — and we can infer that if Diamond’s list were 20% longer, going to 360th place, this month it would have added around 117,500 comics sold, for around $410,000. That’s slightly less than 2% of the value of the Top 300 — so unless the “long tail” for comics is incredibly long (something Diamond’s changed stocking practices would seem to make less likely) the Top 300 really does seem to capture the vast majority of new comics orders. Interestingly, these 21 comics past 300th place are right at the average price for all comics Diamond sells, something we wouldn’t have expected a few years ago. Many of the issues are lower-priced Archies — and only one of the issues is priced higher than $3.99 (Archaia’s Secret History Book 6).

The average comic offered in the Top 300 cost $3.51; the average comic ordered cost $3.50. The median price — the middle price of all 300 comics — was $3.25. $2.99 was also the most common price of comics appearing in the Top 300.

While the direct market is close to flat for the year versus 2008, it is up 32% versus 2004. What’s the role of inflation? The Consumer Price Index has increased 14.5% since 2004, meaning that either we’re selling more units in aggregate, or the average item sold is more expensive by a rate far exceeding inflation. Top 300 Comics unit sales are, as noted above, up 1% year to date versus the same period in 2004, whereas the dollar value of those comics is up 21%. The price of the average comic book retailers sold in 2009 is $3.42, as compared with $2.86 in 2004. That’s an increase of 19.5%. So it’s true that inflation is contributing to part of that increase — but not all. Increased trade paperback sales account for the rest of the jump versus 2004.

Note also that the selection of years for comparison is important in looking at inflation; there are stretches in which price increases in comics have not kept up with the change in CPI, and so sometimes what appears to be an outpacing of inflation is actually the product catching up with other categories. Starting from 1999 prices, CPI predicts a comics price today of $3.36 — much closer to the actual average. Comics pricing increased slower than the pace of inflation in the stretch from 1999-2004.

The monthly Flashbacks column will follow shortly.

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Comics in serial form: Necessary and vital

2009-12-18T10:14:00.003-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

It's been a long time since the days when I was editing Brian Hibbs' Tilting at Windmills column every month for Comics Retailer magazine, but I wanted to direct readers to this month's internet installment, which includes an analysis of the reasons why the comic book periodical is and remains a necessary component to the North American comics publishing industry.

Some of these are points that have been raised here and elsewhere for a long time, having to do with how comics are produced, and the limitations of a graphic-novel only strategy; Brian compiles them in a compelling analysis that also takes in the manga comparison. Were this 1999, this'd get a cover blurb!

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Diamond releases Top 300 lists for November 2009

2009-12-08T17:27:00.010-06:00

by John Jackson Miller

Diamond Comic Distributors has released the Top 300 Comics and Trade Paperback lists for November 2009, as well as the full Market Shares; they can be found now on Comichron pending our calculations of our estimates. As discussed here earlier, the full range of data required to calculate Overall Sales and other statistics is not usually available until midmonth.

Still, the lists give us some details to work with, including a larger-than-usual number of entries after the Top 300. Diamond released a table with the Top 50 comics for publishers with market shares less than 1%; that resulted in some additional data points.

The average price of comics offered in the Top 300 was $3.51; the average weighted price (that is, the average comic book that retailers ordered) in the Top 300 was $3.50. The average comic book in the top 25 cost $3.55. The median comics price in the Top 300 was $3.50; the most common cover price of comics in the Top 300 was $2.99.

Estimates coming soon. Stay tuned!

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November 2009: DC takes seven of Top 10 slots

2009-12-03T10:50:00.008-06:00

Diamond Comic Distributors appears to have shaved a full week off of its process when it comes to starting the rollout of sales information; as with last month, we have the actual order rankings almost immediately. Diamond is also back to rolling out just the Top 10 Comics and Trade Paperbacks this time with the full list to follow; click to see the charts for November 2009.

Blackest Night #5 helped DC again dominate the highest part of the top-sellers list for comics; only Captain America Reborn #4 in third from Marvel kept DC from repeating last month's feat of taking the top six slots. Five of the Top 10 comics ordered by retailers were priced at $2.99, five at $3.99. (They very nearly alternate!)

The unit shares and dollar shares show the same companies in the top seven slots: Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image, IDW, Dynamic Forces (Dynamite) and Boom.

Image's Chew, a $9.99 collection, led the trade paperbacks list. It seems likely that one of the $20 volumes below it on the list will have a higher dollar contribution, but that determination will have to wait for the order index numbers.

Probably the most interesting thing about November 2009's data release, when it all becomes available, is in that trade paperbacks list. It was in November 2008 that Diamond first began publishing its Top 300 Trades, rather than its Top 100. Until now, this year, all year-to-year comparisons have been for the truncated Top 100 lists, but now we'll be able to see a one-to-one (or, rather, a 300-to-300) comparison. My guess, given what we've seen in the Overall estimates, is that the Top 300s for this year have tended to come in slightly below last year dollar-wise, but we'll have to see.

Diamond will release its full Top 300s with its order index numbers next — probably early next week if the pattern holds. As explained here before, because of the earlier release, it is not possible to obtain all the needed corroborating data immediately to generate the sales estimates and aggregated overall estimates that we do here on The Comics Chronicles; those tend to become available mid-month, as the individual publishers get their final actual sales reports.

However, as always, we'll publish the estimate-less rankings when they become available and update as we have more information. Be sure to get our RSS feed and sign up for updates on Twitter.

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October 2009: Flashbacks to the past

2009-11-26T21:51:00.011-06:00

Following the report on comics orders for October 2009, here's a look back at what was going on in previous years...

October 2008's top seller was Marvel's Secret Invasion #7, with first-month orders of approximately 154,600 copies in the direct market, slightly fewer than the previous issue. The midlist pushed deep this month, with the 300th place comic book selling more than 4,000 copies — resulting in what was then the best month to date in the Diamond Exclusive Era for Overall Sales, Top 300 Comics Dollar Sales, and Top Comics Plus Top Trades. The average cost per comic book in the Top 300 also set a record high. Check out the sales chart here.

October 2004's top-seller was Identity Crisis #5, with first-month orders of more than 125,500 copies. Initial orders for the Top 300 Comics were actually off more in October 2004 than they were in October 2009; a 20% drop. One part of it was that no issue of Avengers came out; Marvel had released two in September and would release two in November. Check out the sales chart here.

October 1999's top-seller was Uncanny X-Men #375, a $2.99 special issue with preorders of approximately 114,900 copies in the direct market. This ended a ten-month run for Uncanny as the top title; a stretch in which nothing else major was really going on. The big news of the month, though, was the Sandman: The Dream Hunters hardcover, which had preorders of more than 18,000 copies at $29.95, one of the earlier graphic novel releases to top the half-million dollar mark at full retail in preorders. Check out the October 1999 sales chart here.

October 1994 had a split decision atop the comics charts. Capital's list had the deluxe version of X-Men #39 in first, with Spawn #19 and #20 in second and third; Diamond's list had a complete reversal of the three positions, with Spawn #20 selling 5% more copies than the identically priced X-Men issue. Newsstand draws and for X-Men were likely higher, and it had subscription sales in the mix as well, so it likely gets the nod. Capital's orders for X-Men #39 were 94,850 copies; overall sales of the issue, including newsstand and subscription copies, were in the mid-300,000s.

Interestingly, in October 1994, the fastest-moving thing in most comics shops was not comics at all, but Magic: The Gathering, which was at the peak of its initial wave of popularity with recently released Legends display boxes going for four times suggested retail price.

October 1989's top seller at Capital City Distribution was Legends of the Dark Knight #2, edging out Batman #442, which cost fifty cents less and featured the first appearance of the Tim Drake Robin. It's probable that including newwstand sales and subscriptions, that regular Batman issue might have nosed into first; Capital's Legends #2 sales were 155,650 copies, while Batman #442 had Capital orders of 152,450 copies. It's a fair bet that with the newsstand bias toward less-expensive and ongoing titles (and the fact that Batman took at least a couple thousand subscribers into 1989), that issue may have been the true #1 book marketwide. Orders overall for the two issues overall were likely in the 600,000-copy neighborbood.

It's notable that the trade paperback was already beginning to make a market impact; the cover feature of the October 1989 Capital City Internal Correspondence magazine dealt with the increasing backlist. "We're reordering books in quantities I never thought possible," said Capital co-founder John Davis.

Finally, October 1984's top comic book was Marvel Super-Heroes Secret Wars #10, marking ten straight months with the limited series in the top slot. The third-place title may have actually been the second-place title in dollar volume: DC's Who's Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe #1.

October 2009 comics orders slammed; market off slightly for year

2009-11-25T00:04:00.004-06:00

The estimates of Diamond Comic Distributors orders for October 2009 are online here at The Comics Chronicles, and they point to a down month across the board, with double-digit losses in all categories.

There was a particularly steep drop of 30% in dollar orders for the Top 100 Trade Paperbacks; DC had Watchmen and a heavily ordered Joker hardcover last October. Comparatives were tough on the comics side, too, with issues of Secret Invasion and Final Crisis topping the charts last October. Dark Avengers is, thus far, not playing the same kind of regular chart-dominating role that we saw Marvel’s stand-alone "event hub" limited series (Civil War, Secret Invasion) playing in recent years. DC, however, is getting mileage from Blackest Night, which helped it take the top six slots on the chart for what is, as suggested here earlier, likely the first time since 1968.

There was also much more strength further down the charts last year; the 300th place comic book had orders of around 4,230 copies last October, versus around 2,711 copies this year. This October only had four shipping weeks, versus five last year; the fifth-week effect tends to be an amplifier, allowing an extra high-traffic day for titles releasing in the month as well as increasing the probability that a title will be available for shipping in a given month in the first place.

It all added up, again, to a decidedly rough month — with all comics, trade paperbacks, and magazine dollar orders at Diamond down 19%. Still, while this month sent the year-to-date total back into the red, it is only just so — less than $5 million in orders separates this year and last. And the industry is still a full third larger than it was five years ago. While prospects for a flat or slightly up year are looking less likely, the industry would not be down by that much for the year even if November and December followed October’s track.

The aggregate figures:

TOP 300 COMICS UNIT SALES
October 2009: 6.20 million copies
Versus 1 year ago this month: -18%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +5%
Versus 10 years ago this month: -4%
YEAR TO DATE: 62.42 million copies, -5% vs. 2008, +2% vs. 2004, -4% vs. 1999

TOP 300 COMICS DOLLAR SALES
October 2009: $21.47 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: -14%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +26%
Versus 10 years ago this month: +24%
YEAR TO DATE: $213.81 million, -2% vs. 2008, +22% vs. 2004, +28% vs. 1999

TOP 300 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES
October 2009: $5.92 million
Versus 1 year ago this month, just the Top 100 vs. the Top 100: -30%
Versus 5 years ago this month, just the Top 100 vs. the Top 100: -7%
Versus 10 years ago this month, just the Top 25 vs. the Top 25: +66%
YEAR TO DATE: $66.28 million; down 12% when just comparing just the Top 100 each month

TOP 300 COMICS + TOP 300 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES
October 2009: $27.39 million
Versus 1 year ago this month, just the Top 100 vs. the Top 100: -17%
Versus 5 years ago this month, just the Top 100 vs. the Top 100: +19%
Versus 10 years ago this month, just the Top 25 vs. the Top 25: +26%
YEAR TO DATE: $280.05 million; down 5% when just comparing just the Top 100 each month

OVERALL DIAMOND SALES (including all comics, trades, and magazines)
October 2009: $34.19 million ($37.94 million with UK)
Versus 1 year ago this month: -19%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +23%
YEAR TO DATE: $358.85 million, -1% vs. 2008, +33% vs. 2004

The average comic offered in the Top 300 cost $3.53; the average comic ordered cost $3.46. The median price — the middle price of all 300 comics — was $3.25. $2.99 was also the most common price of comics appearing in the Top 300.

The monthly flashback column, looking at past Octobers, will be along soon. Happy Thanksgiving!