On March 23, 2020, Diamond Comic Distributors suspended its shipments of new comics to the Direct Market for several weeks due to the Coronavirus pandemic; on April 17, DC responded with an emergency move to set up two new distributors — an arrangement which since has appeared to become permanent for one of them, Lunar … Read more
When Diamond paused its monthly retail sales charts (and it apparently is just a pause) this winter, we also paused our DC rankings, since it’s usually better to do both sets at once. But since they’re ready, let’s get rolling again with four months of DC order rankings! As a refresher: Our DC rankings are … Read more
Winter has historically meant fewer new comics releases, though in the 2010s the old “dead quarter” term ceased to be applicable. That said, this winter saw a slowing of last summer’s recovery in slate sizes, with January 2021 slates only 56% the size of last January’s. January 2020 had an additional “week” in the form … Read more
Our list of second-and-later printings of comic books released in 2020 is now complete. Including next week’s issues, publishers released 357 reprint editions into the Direct Market in 2020, down from 572 in 2019 owing to pandemic cutbacks. Click to see the full list! Marvel‘s 169 reprint issues was 47% of the total; that’s down … Read more
We resumed unit sales estimates with our September 2020 report, introducing several new workflows to the process; for the following month’s report, we’ve added even more as we seek to unlock the limited information released by comics distributors in the months following the Shutdown Split. Our Combined Comics Sales for October 2020 page is now … Read more
After some delay associated with implementation of yet more new procedures, our projections for DC comics sales to retailers in October 2020 are now online. Batman: Three Jokers #3 completed the trifecta, with the title leading for its third consecutive month. Noteworthy is the fact that DC only released 49 new comics books in October … Read more