January 2015 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.

The Direct Market began the year strongly, up 12%, thanks to the return of the Star Wars license to Marvel. Marvel's relaunch issue Star Wars #1 had sales that, when UK and February reorders are included, put it over 1 million copies sold; Diamond shipped closed to 986,000 copies to North American retailers in the month of January. The lion's share of those orders were placed by comics ships, although one of the dozens of variant covers was for the repackager Loot Crate, whose orders would have been somewhere over 350,000 copies based on what we've seen in the past. Regardless, it's safe to assume the issue would have taken the century bestseller record to that point based on comic-shop sales alone.

There are a number of other things we can say about it that we don't normally keep categories for. The issue sold nearly nine times as many copies as its closest competitor in January, Batman #38; this doesn't appear to have happened since 1991, when X-Men Vol. 2 #1 — at 8 million copies plus, the best-selling comic in North American history — outpaced the second-place title, X-Force #3, by about the same factor. Further, the issue outsold the next 12 comic books on the charts combined — and, perhaps more impressively, sold as many copies as every comic book between 163rd and 300th place, combined. About every seventh comic book retailers ordered in the Top 300 was a Star Wars #1 — and the comic book alone represented 11% of Diamond's dollar sales for the month, if we look just at standard retail price. That's larger than everyone's market share but Marvel and DC.

Overall comics unit sales were up 10.27% year-over-year, but slightly off from December. January 2015 was a four-ship-week month, but while January 2014 had five Wednesdays, its first Wednesday was counted as part of December 2013's shipping. So it's really a four-week-to-four-week comparison.

Read more in our preliminary and final analysis posts for 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 plus any post-#300 items from its Top Independent and Small Publisher charts.
If you don't see a book, Diamond released no data for it.
Items marked with daggers [†] included 350,000 to 450,000 copies from the online reseller Loot Crate.
Items marked with asterisks [*] had their reported orders reduced by 10% due to returnability.
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.

January 2015 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 300 Graphic Novel charts, plus any post-#300 items from its Top Independent and Manga charts. 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.

Graphic novel sales were up nearly 17% unrelated to the action in new comic books, so the market had strength in other places besides just Star Wars.