February 2008 Comic Book Sales to Comics Shops

Estimated Comics Shipped to North American Comics Shops
Based on Reports from Diamond Comic Distributors

Covers and issue links on this page lead to current eBay listings. This site may be compensated if you make a purchase.

More than 16 years after a comic book with the same name and issue number became one of the best-selling comic books of all time, X-Force #1 topped a month that otherwise looked like a return to slower Februaries past. Diamond Comic Distributors’ overall sales of comic books, trade paperbacks, and magazines to retailers equaled approximately $32.53 million, an increase of 1% over February 2007. But, except for trade paperback sales, all the narrower categories posted slight declines, with drops of 5% and 6% respectively for units and dollars sold of Diamond’s Top 300 comic books.

X-Force #1 was one of only three titles to break the 100,000-copy barrier, coming in at approximately 105,000 copies. After a relatively long stretch of event-driven top-sellers, it was actually the lowest-selling top-seller at Diamond since February 2001, when Uncanny X-Men #391 topped the list with 102,400 preordered copies. (Comparing apples to apples, reorders for that issue probably would have resulted in a higher total.) The identically named 1991 X-Force #1 phenomenon, incidentally, had orders of 3.18 million copies, a staggering 3 million of which went into the Direct Market. Capital City Distribution alone had orders of 806,100 copies of the issue, which had five variant covers and relaunched the New Mutants title under Rob Liefeld.

The major publishers’ slates were actually smaller in February 2008 than they had been in recent months — the top five publishers placed 232 comics in the Top 300, versus 246 in January. The result was that 32 publishers made the Top 300, a larger number than in a while. One new publisher made the list for the first time: the numerically named Th3rdworld, whose Space Doubles #1 came in 300th place.

Read more in our original report from the month. You can also click to skip to the Top Graphic Novels for the month.

—John Jackson Miller

This list includes all items on Diamond's Top 300 chart. If you don't see a book, Diamond released no data for it.
Click to read the methodology for this table's estimates.
Distributor charts are regional commodity reports, not measures of a work's total reach. Read our FAQ.
Title links below lead to current listings for the issues on eBay. As an eBay Partner, this site may be compensated if you make a purchase.

February 2008 Graphic Novel Sales to Comics Shops

Estimated Graphic Novels and Trade Paperbacks Shipped to North American Comics Shops Based on Reports from Diamond Comic Distributors

This list includes all items on Diamond's Top 100 Graphic Novel chart. If you don't see a book, Diamond released no data for it.

The links lead to title details on Amazon (paid links). You can also find the books at your comics shop.

Febauary 2008 marked exactly 10 years since Diamond Comic Distributors began reporting indexed trade-paperback sales; it began with a modest list of ten items that also included price guides. The category this month fared better than periodicals when compared with the previous year.