And the posting of earlier months continues — this time with the full year 2004 and then back to fill in the end of 2003 for good measure. This is the year with Identity Crisis and “Avengers Disassembled,” culminating in December with New Avengers #1.
February 2004 marked the first month that Diamond released indexed sales figures for its Top 100 Trade Paperbacks; previously, it had been the top 50. This marked the increasing importance of front-list trades to Diamond’s business. I adjusted the comparatives for each month to account for the change — thus, while the February 2004-and-onward aggregate totals reflect the dollar value of the full Top 100, the percentage change is an apples-to-apples comparison using whatever portion of the chart Diamond was reporting earlier. It only reported the Top 25 in 1999, so the five-year comparisons are for just the Top 25, and so on.
This brings the number of products with sales figures on-site above the 25,000 mark. Still not quite to the halfway mark with the Diamond data, but there is less of it the further back we go because of that trade paperback change.
Comichron founder John Jackson Miller has tracked the comics industry for more than 25 years, including a decade editing the industry’s retail trade magazine; he is the author of several guides to comics, as well as more than a hundred comic books for various franchises.
He is the author of novels including Star Wars: Kenobi, Star Wars: A New Dawn, Star Trek: Discovery – The Enterprise War, and his latest release, Star Trek: Discovery – Die Standing. Read more about them at his fiction site.
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