Alliance Entertainment trades on NASDAQ as AENT, where its market cap today is $200 million. The firm says the Diamond purchase came out of its existing $120 million line of credit which it expects to increase to $160 million. Its history is here.

Diamond was founded on Feb. 1, 1982 by Steve Geppi; this ends his 43 years of ownership. Our distribution timeline is here.

We’ve posted the monthly estimates for

The Marvel adjustments are in there — and I additionally took a look at how the independent comics are doing compared with what they did when Marvel and DC were fully at Diamond. The news is startling. There were 737 indie comics that charted in the first quarter of 2020; looking at the Top 737 indies in 2022 in the same period shows a unit sales increase of 67%. A lot of it comes from the fact that Image and Boom generated a lot of hits; the first-place indie in early 2020 would only place ninth in winter 2022.

So that’s a positive for Diamond, one supposes: between Marvel’s sales increases and those with the indies it’s pushing, it’s basically replaced DC’s periodical sales. It’s not enough to make up for losing two-thirds of Marvel, but it is something noteworthy.

X-Men Red #1 was the April-shipping comic book most reordered by Diamond retailers last week.

January 2022 estimates are online. Scorched #1 from Image sold over 257,000 copies to retailers in the first monthly list since the majority of Marvel’s distribution went to Penguin Random House. Total Direct Market orders likely $45 million: see the charts here.

For the latest batch of changes, we consolidated lists into a single page, where the Diamond chart appears by default, but there’s an option to project Marvel overall orders based on what we believe Diamond’s share to be. In this month’s case that puts She-Hulk #1 in second.

The order defaults to Diamond’s original; click on the “Projected” tab to reorder by what we believe the overall Marvel totals could be. That column also restores the reorder penalty that Diamond applies to titles. As always, estimates subject to change.

We have consolidated on the same page our retail initial order dataset’s rankings of DC’s titles, which found that Detective Comics #1050 was the most ordered DC book. DCs will not be integrated with Diamond at this time; Marvel’s move to PRH has made that process more difficult, as where the Marvel titles landed in the Diamond list previously had been a solid benchmark to compare against. Without it, there just aren’t as many high sellers that we have 100% of the sales reporting on.

If you can’t see the yellow column beside the Diamond chart, you may need to refresh or clear your cache. After a couple of years of the tables bifurcated — and for a while, trifurcated — we’re trying to keep things on one page. Until the next distribution gyration, anyway!

About January’s Direct Market size, $45 million would be ahead of January 2020 — and the same size as January 2019, which had the benefit of one extra shipping week.

Longtime chart-watchers will notice that with DC out of the monthly charts and only about 3/8 of Marvel sales at Diamond, a LOT of rarely seen stuff climbed into Diamond’s Top 400. CGC graded releases, Dynamic Forces signed copies, high-dollar variants — even comics bundles.

A huge tranche of data available now at Comichron! First, we have the Top 1000 comics and graphic novels from Diamond on

News since Friday: with variants merged, House of Slaughter #1 moved into first by 29 copies. A photo finish or a dead heat — it’s really just a snapshot in time at Diamond, where a week of reorders or damage returns or just about anything could have reversed the order. Less than a case of copies separating them! Merging BRZRKR #1 variants also improved its position. Rankings are fun, but here’s the important stuff.

Based on Diamond’s Top 4000 comics and Top 4000 graphic novels, 2021 was a huge year for comics shops — up 36% to $600 million — and specifically for comic books, which sold nearly 50% more copies. Diamond’s end-of year report revealed what share of Marvel’s business Diamond retained after Oct. 1.

Comparing before-and-after on titles suggests Diamond kept around 36% of Marvel’s unit sales of comics. If that ratio holds, Diamond stands to remain the top distributor in 2022.

Steve Geppi said Diamond kept 45% of Marvel: likely that’s the number of ordering accounts, as smaller accounts were more likely to stay. This has ramifications for Diamond’s future monthly charts: basically, just triple Marvel’s sales to get the whole.

While Diamond has not released monthly charts for October through December, we’ve used the 2021 end-of-year data to reverse-engineer charts for those months. These are different from usual as they include reorders, but they provide a good idea of the real rankings.

Here’s October, the first month of Marvel’s deal with Penguin Random House. Two heavy hitters, House of Slaughter #1 and Gunslinger Spawn #1 led Diamond. Amazing Spider-Man #75 likely sold 145k overall, third place if all Marvel’s sales were at Diamond.   Now, Comichron already had projections for October, including DC. We’ll use the 2021 end-of-year data to revise those rankings, although again there’s a bit of a difference because these October stats include orders from November and December. Look for it later on.

November is when Diamond was hit with that ransomware attack, and here there’s really no guarantee that the comics listed for November all shipped in the calendar month. What’s the Furthest Place from Here #1 from Image led the Diamond chart. Right off, we see Venom #1 surely would have been tops at Diamond had all copies been available there: we project 162,000 copies for it, based on Diamond’s data. We’ll get to that when we get our all-industry projections, including DC, done for November. Stay tuned on that one.

Finally, December was led by Stray Dogs Dog Days #1. It still would have been #1 regardless: Venom #2, Marvel’s best, placed 11th and would have been in second place had all copies been sold by Diamond.

Again, these are not the monthly reports Diamond normally serves: they’re culled from its end-of-year Top 4000 lists, so anything not on those lists doesn’t appear. Reorders of copies from earlier months don’t appear either, because there’s no way to tell what month they sold in. We can also use this process to backfill and advise our reports for other missing months like January through May 2021. It’s not known whether Diamond will release full monthly reports for any of this; if they do, we’ll certainly post them.

Launching in 1946, Newsdealer and its successor publication Bestsellers served retailers at least until 1970 with content about selling comic books. Among its regular features was its Comics Directory page, stating what comic books were shipping and when — and from which distributors. In many cases, it’s the only record remaining of when certain comic books shipped.

Historians who have used copyright filings to find that information have found it incomplete. There are many years where publishers, like Archie, are absent from printed copyright records; Charlton appears not to have filed in the 1960s at all. Some information is inaccurate: Harvey in the early 1960s reported a single publication date, the 15th of each month, for all its comics in its filings, which simply wasn’t true. And arrival date stamps prove that many comics appeared on shelves before their copyright dates, even in the case of reliable copyrighters like Dell.

This makes the Comics Directory pages a useful supplement — but it is complicated to interpret and use. Comichron has added an informational key to each image, as well as a link to a page describing in detail how to read the feature and identify distributors. It also gets into some of the feature’s peculiarities, comics occasionally recurred with different dates.

Neither Newsdealer nor Bestsellers appear to be held in any library in any depth, so the need for the resource was clear. Almost two dozen Directory pages are online now, with Beerbohm providing Comichron with more. There are other materials, including many articles with circulation data, Comichron’s specialty, which we expect to find a place for in the future.

We don’t see much inflation in new comics prices, at least not yet: the average comic retailers ordered in September 2021 was $4.54, versus $4.41 two years earlier.  Thanks to Diamond’s record month for graphic novels; we believe overall Direct Market dollars topped $60 million.

Now to the summer overall: With September, Diamond’s released four months of detailed data (like it always used to do) from which we estimate Direct Market size for that third of the year to be $230 million. That’s higher in nominal dollars than any year since our tracking began.

We don’t often adjust groupings that include graphic novels for inflation, because the product mix changes over time to include more hardcovers, so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. But 2021 is only behind 2016’s DC Rebirth year — and 2021’s estimate may even be a bit low.

So this gets us to the question: where will 2021 wind up? Odds are increasing we could see a $600+ million year in the Direct Market, which would be an increase of more than a third over 2020 and well beyond 2019’s pre-pandemic numbers.

It further appears that comic books — not manga (which are classified as graphic novels), but periodical comic books — could vault well past $400 million this year, an increase possibly as high as 50% over 2020.

September was the last month before Marvel left Diamond for Penguin Random House; that’ll require another change in methodology (although POSSIBLY an easier one to deal with than DC’s move did). We’ll see what October portends!

You can read more about that there — but in the meantime, there’s something else notable: the report completes 25 years of Direct Market sales estimates from yours truly. That’s 300 reports — that math’s easy! — comprising sales reports for more than 180,000 comic books and graphic novels sold since September 1996.

That’s nearly two billion comics that Diamond shipped — and well over a billion dollars’ worth of graphic novels accounted for.

The real accomplishment, of course, is the industry’s: it’s the work of the publishers, Diamond, and retailers for moving all those copies. Still, it is for me a personal milestone. I’ve done some form of pre-publication cleanup and analytical work on almost all of those entries, and the calculations and presentation add up to something like a thousand hours, or about six weeks of my life, day and night. And I continued it long after I was no longer associated with the magazine where they were first published, Comics Retailer (later Comics & Games Retailer).

I’ve worked on the reports in hotel rooms and airports — wherever I happened to be when they became available. The last couple of months of reports, for example, have all landed amid appearances on behalf of my new novel, Star Trek: Picard – Rogue Elements. A lot of work’s been done at 1 a.m. over the years, cleaning up the entries — which appear in all caps in Diamond’s reports — as well as figuring out what publisher names go with the three-letter codes they get in the Diamond releases. And that’s all before any math!

Clearly, I thought it was worth doing. Explaining why takes us on a trip through how the figures came to exist in the first place.

MONTHLY SALES CHARTS: THE EARLY DAYS

Prior to the early 1980s, the only public comics sales charts including actual numbers had appeared in fanzine articles collecting postal Statements of Ownership from the comics themselves. These, of course, reported only annual averages — and only took into account comics sold by subscription. There were, in The Comics Reader and later in Amazing Heroes, attempts to come at it from the other direction by surveying retailers; I began doing this in 1994 in Comics Retailer as “Market Beat,” a column that continued until the publication’s end. While I was able to generate average store sales for various titles with this, it was far from ideal — and such efforts did not speak to the number of copies in circulation.

We began to get part of that picture in the early 1980s. Capital City Distribution was one of several Direct Market distributors operating in that period, having started in Madison, Wis. in the spring of 1980 with 17 retail accounts and a half-dozen vendors. Cofounder Milton Griepp began publishing monthly sales charts in the company’s newsletter — later magazine — Internal Correspondence. Having visited Capital City’s archives and later ICV2’s archives, I have most of these — and while sales charts began appearing in the publication as early as February 1984, it’s really what came along in October of that year that changed the game.

Griepp did not include sales figures in his rankings; it’s not clear that either Capital or the publishers themselves would have wanted to see those numbers publicized. Direct Market sales were still growing, and Capital was only a part of them; while today’s Diamond sales figures are a pretty good picture of periodical sales overall, back then, no one distributor’s sales would have painted a full picture. Instead, starting in October 1984 issue — the same one that included a full-page memorial for Direct Market founder Phil Seuling — Griepp published something which served a purpose for the retailers Capital worked with: “order index numbers.”

These were presented as a ratio of the sales of a key issue each month.  Retailers could see that the average Capital customer preordered, say, 160 copies of Uncanny X-Men for every 100 copies of Amazing Spider-Man preordered. (The first month, Griepp used Secret Wars #10, the top seller, as the key issue.)  That permitted retailers to make adjustments in their orders to bring them into line with national trends. If you were only ordering 12 copies of X-Men for every 10 copies of Spidey, you’d know X-Men probably had room to grow.

This is a significant point: the monthly sales reports were never designed to be read by consumers. They were there to help retailers see larger trends. But because all the titles existed in mathematical relationship to one another thanks to the order index numbers, it became possible for anyone who knew the approximate real number of orders by the Direct Market of a single title to make an educated guess as to the sales of the others.

The problem with the method, of course, was that because Capital only represented a chunk of the Direct Market — and a different portion of each publisher’s sales, too — a certain amount of error was built in. For a while, DC’s trade terms with Capital were inferior to those Marvel was offering, and in that time, Capital’s share of DC’s total copy count was smaller. Capital appears to have represented about 11% of Marvel’s
total copies sold (including newsstand) in 1986, for example; its DC share was closer to 9%. Meanwhile its share of Kitchen Sink’s sales in 1985 approached 23%. But a rough approximation was better than nothing.

And because it worked with any title, the publishers themselves, large and small, could estimate what the rest of the field was doing. I know for a fact it was being done; in addition to talking to publishers before 1995 about their calculations for “the magic number” — the number of copies one point on Capital’s chart equalled — I have also obtained internal spreadsheets and documents wherein various publishers unlocked the various monthly tables.

When Diamond created its own newsletter — which evolved into Diamond Dialogue magazine— it began running its own order index numbers, keyed to a different title but functioning effectively the same way. No other distributors I can find published indexed sales figures, but Capital and Diamond had together captured enough of the Direct Market by the early 1990s that a pretty good model of overall sales could be worked out using the tables of either distributor. The fact that their rankings tended to coincide pretty well likewise added reliability.

And then… it all blew up.

BACK TO THE DARK AGES

In December 1994, Marvel announced it had bought Heroes World Distribution, then a regional distributor and then the third largest Direct Market distributor. You can read more about that era here and here; it changed pretty much everything.

The intent of the purchase was to make Heroes’ World the exclusive distributor of Marvel comics to shops, and by the following summer, that became a reality. Every other distributor lost the ability to distribute Marvel’s books as of July 1995 — except for Capital, which through a legal settlement kept them through the end of August. DC, under pressure from its corporate parent to respond in kind, crafted a deal to make Diamond the exclusive broker of its books — and then it was off to the races, with Image, Dark Horse, and Acclaim signing similar deals with Diamond that summer and Capital signing up Kitchen Sink, Viz, and some smaller publishers. I joked at a panel the following year that I’d never seen so many college kids signing contracts outside of the NBA Draft. You can see a record of the moves here.

Suddenly it was impossible for a retailer to get all the comics being published without accounts with three different distributors — and the charts and their order index numbers were of little use. Yes, Diamond’s tables captured all Direct Market preorders for the publishers it carried — but it was missing Marvel and Capital’s data. Capital continued with its own charts for a time making informed guesses about the titles it could not carry, but eventually those ended — and by the summer of 1996, Diamond bought out Capital.

There had been, by that point, a full year with no single unified sales chart. Matthew High, then of Antarctic Press, had likely become the first person to post estimates online with a series of reports on Usenet in December 1995 — but those only included Diamond. And Marvel — which had moved to Heroes World in part so it would no longer have to share the promotional limelight with multiple other publishers — came to miss the value of seeing charts that, so often before, its titles had topped. With Marvel in bankruptcy and under new management, I found it was amenable to sharing information for publication in a unified set of charts in Comics Retailer.

Armed with Heroes World’s contribution — and the aid of a pool of publishers providing many data points to unlock Diamond’s table — I published the first unified sales tables in over a year in a release covering September 1996’s sales, just in time for Marvel’s “Heroes Reborn” titles to launch. Jim Lee’s Fantastic Four #1 was the first top seller on the charts; you can see all the #1s that followed here.

Yes, that timing was no mistake; Marvel had a reason it wanted the charts back running around that time. But getting the unified tables back was of greater importance: from then until now, the spreadsheet files in my system have always been titled “Harmony.” Besides, DC was topping the charts just two months later anyway with the wedding of Superman.

By April 1997, when Marvel threw in the towel on Heroes World, the Diamond tables suddenly captured almost the entire comics preorder universe. But with the files already started and the industry still in a tailspin, I kept at it, hoping the information would be of some use to people in the trade. It turned out to be a longer-term commitment than I’d imagined!

GOING PUBLIC
As noted above, the distributor sales estimates had never been intended for general consumption, beyond the order-index-number-free consumer versions that had appeared in Previews. But the internet had changed that in the late 1990s, and with the market in decline, I was eager to make the most out of it, both in Comics Retailer and in Comics Buyer’s Guide, its sister publication.

It was novel having so much information to work with. At times, particularly early on, I tried to push the Direct Market data too far — attempting make it say more than it was able to support. In early 1998, having completed the first full calendar year of monthly reports, I took to Comics Buyer’s Guide‘s annual Publishers Issue in an attempt to construct something of a Fortune 500, ranking the Top 50 publishers by their sales.

The problem was that the Diamond data only accounted for preorders within the Direct Market; before 2003, it was not possible to know a publisher’s entire dollar sales. It also only reported sales on a few trade paperbacks. Only the Top Sellers were known. Beyond that, nothing was known about sales in the book channel. Every one of the narrow categories we had data for was led by Marvel, but much of what DC was selling was outside what we could see. In the end, I hedged and declared a tie. DC executives at that time were highly critical of the piece, and they had a point. We didn’t run the feature again.

Another early misstep had come in mid-1998, where I’d seen a plateau amid the market’s collapse and reported on it in CBG, wondering if recovery was at hand. It wasn’t. I didn’t have enough
years of data yet to tell what a real turnaround looked like; the market
had a ways yet to go before it hit bottom. When things finally began to
turn in 2001, I approached it with more caution.

It was not uncommon in those early years for publishers responding to the numbers to seek to “work the ref,” although that’s not really the right metaphor: I was really more in the role of a reporter conveying what was coming from the scorer’s table. One executive suggested I “get someone who knew something about statistics,” not knowing about my poli sci master’s degree which required plenty of stats. (I took Advanced Statistics for the Social Sciences from James E. Campbell, who did some of the earliest major work on the “midterm effect” in congressional elections. So me and the numbers go back a ways.)

And in a larger sense, arguing the tables was kind of pointless as a competitive exercise, because if a publisher really did sell more copies to Diamond than the tables indicated, the Order Index Number meant that every publisher would have sold more. So the rankings of the individual books wouldn’t have changed. As time went on, we heard those concerns less frequently. The numbers spoke for themselves, and as time went on and more data was collected, I got a little better at getting out of their way and letting them have their say.

TIME MARCHES ON

I was promoted out of day-to-day work on Comics & Games Retailer in 2003, but I continued to provide my monthly report to the magazine for publication — and then to Comics Buyer’s Guide‘s website, for several years after that. During that time, I left the company to write comics and novels full time, launching Comichron in March 2007 to give my research a permanent online home. The magazines are long gone, but the history has not been lost.

All during that time, Diamond has increased the amount of information it’s made available. In 1998, responding to DC about the same issues noted above, it began publishing market shares based on what it actually sold, meaning reorders were part of the equation and comics that never shipped weren’t. In February 2003, it shifted to reporting the number of copies shipped in its ranking tables, rather than preorders. That put a stop to books making the charts that never came out.

And all along, it added to the number of graphic novels it reported sales on, from the Top 10 to the Top 25, then 50, then 100, then 300, then  finally 500. Comics bestsellers went accidentally to 400 items for a while a couple of years ago, but while I reported those extra titles, I continued to keep 300 as the benchmark grouping.

Milton Griepp returned to publishing in the early 2000s with ICV2.com — literally, Internal Correspondence Vol. 2 — and began running estimates. John Mayo of ComicBookPage has also published his own estimates for many years, most recently at Comic Book Resources. We conversed and compared notes on occasion, particularly when we see some warning flag in the data that suggests accidental misreporting. We all want the information out there to be correct.

CHANGE AND CHANGE AGAIN

As the social media age grew to encompass Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube, the charts gained renewed attention in the second half of the 2010s. Debates about how comics sell and which comics sell were nothing new for fandom, of course, and while “horserace” enthusiasts pored over every chart looking for hints about how their favorites — or least favorites — were doing, caveats became all the more important. Many comic books don’t have to make much money at all in periodical form so long as they get to the graphic novel collection, for example.

Likewise, the content of comics — while the reason we’re all here! — turns out to often not be as important to determining sales numbers as factors like the number of retailers in the business, the discounts they’re offered, cash flow in the business, cover price, how variant cover programs are structured, and a variety of exogenous variables. Events in a comic book can easily make sales spike upward, but it happens the other way around less often. The pull-and-hold systems retailers use provides a certain stability to sales within series across time.

So it was that by early 2020, the Direct Market had fully recovered from its most recent slowdown, which encompassed all of 2017 and the two quarters on either side of it. That’s when the Coronavirus pandemic struck, forcing a several-week closure at Diamond — and we were back to a new period of change in both the business and reporting. DC set up two alternative distributors and then departed Diamond completely at the end of June 2020; Diamond, which had paused its reporting after March, returned for three months with sales reports that were not indexed in the fall, only to go silent again until June 2021, when indexed reports returned.

This all made the 25th year of my monthly reporting the most difficult yet, as a new system had to be developed to make sure there was no break in reporting. We developed a subset of retailer initial orders to refer to, giving us at least rudimentary positions for all titles — and a way to interpolate where DC’s titles fit once Diamond returned to is regular reporting. Should Lunar Distribution begin reporting sales figures, they will of course be incorporated.

And this fall, more changes yet, as Marvel’s move (and next year, IDW‘s move) to Penguin Random House means that Diamond will go from reporting all of those publishers’ comic-book sales to only the portion that it continues to sell as a wholesaler. As we’ll be able to know what portion of Diamond’s sales went to PRH, we should be able to project overall figures — which is exactly how it was done before 1995, when there were multiple distributors. Every change introduces complications, but they’re not necessarily new ones. We’ve dealt with fragmented data before.

A USEFUL MEASURE

There has always been, and will continue to be, criticism that the monthly figures do not include this or that portion of the comics market. That is absolutely true, but it is also acknowledged in the fine print on every page — as well as on our FAQ page. It also reports only comics sold to retailers and not consumers — but circulation is what matters to collectors in the future, not present-day popularity. The comics that retailers bought are paid for as far as publishers are concerned — and permanently part of circulating supply, as far as collector are concerned. Sell-through and sales-to-consumer charts are interesting for their own reasons — and I’ve done several over the years — but even if we had a Bookscan for comic books that encompassed every single shop, we’d still need to know how many comics retailers bought.

Furthermore, I go to great lengths in my verbiage to be specific about what we’re referring to. I’ve written the phrase “North American comics shops” more often than I can remember. It is not the case that every headline on this site has been as specific as it needs to be; nor can I guarantee that everyone who draws upon the charts will bring along the caveats in their own analyses. Probably the most common error involves reporting the categories; our sales figures for the Top 300 comics have often been described elsewhere as the sales figures for all comics. (In reality, as noted, we only got a figure for all comics in a month for the first time last week.)

I’ve tried hard not to repeat my early errors of making the numbers say too much; I rely on aggregate changes to a great degree. I’ve tended not to run trendlines on individual titles, as some analysts have; there’s a lot of noise at the individual-issue level, a lot of it caused by the calendar. Two consecutive issues of a title can sell exactly the same number of copies, yet if one issue comes out the first week of the month and the other comes out the last week, the number of copies shipped will appear much different. I did present the figures for that manner in the Standard Catalog of Comic Books, but that was in the context of an attempt to record every fact known about each comic book.

I also don’t spend a lot of time worrying with the competition between publishers, although I recognize (as I mentioned above) that is a favored pastime among many. Having survived the 1990s covering the market, I think the  important races are with our own past performance; if the industry isn’t succeeding in aggregate, “who’s winning” isn’t that important.

In the meantime, I’ll be here keeping watch on the data — and feeling, sometimes, like a numbers-geek version of the knight guarding the temple in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The numbers might be just a rusty cup, but they also just might be important. You never know!

ONWARD!

So that’s the tale of 25 years of monthly sales charts — all of which you can see here — and which are themselves just one data set I’m working with. I’m continuing to add material to the site, and I have enough of the monthly data to fill out many years before 1996 — including making a guess about the months when the charts went dark; those will appear here in the future. There are some additions and updates coming for the site which I’m excited about sharing in the days to come. (And we do have a Patreon if you’ve found the work useful.)

For now, let me thank you for following these reports — and also all the folks at Diamond and the publishers who’ve made them possible over the years. Be sure to drop in next month for the September sales report as we’re able to publish our first 25-year comparisons in the Diamond Exclusive Era!

To clarify the comparatives: We’re taking the Top 300 grouping for July 2019 (seen at http://bit.ly/Jul19Comics), knocking out all the DC books, and then refilling the rest of the Top 300s with non-DC items. You can see an example on this July’s page of what that means for just the Top 10s. It gives us as close a comparison as we can get, imagining what if DC wasn’t around for Diamond back then, either.

And in a first after doing these charts for 25 years, a book of mine, Marvel’s Star Wars Legends Omnibus: The Old Republic Vol. 1, led graphic novel sales in units and dollars. Definitely a strange feeling, but I’m thankful to everyone who supported the book.

These are just the Diamond charts; our charts merging our projections for DC comics sales will appear later this week at http://bit.ly/Jul21Comics.