The Diamond comics rankings and estimates for 1997 are now finally online here with the addition of pages for October, November, and December 1997.
It’s a period that saw major drops year-over-year against some pretty big events — November 1997 unit and dollar sales were off more than a quarter (!) versus the Superman wedding month of November 1996. But December also included the year’s top-seller, Darkness #11, which with its eleven covers proved the death of the variant-cover craze was greatly exaggerated. And the quarter included the “Heroes Return” relaunches, setting some of Marvel’s flagship titles off on their third volumes.
I also discovered that the Diamond Final Order Market Shares actually began two months earlier than I figured, in August 1997. Beginning with the October shares, the market shares appeared in Diamond’s Dateline retailer newsletter — but the August and September shares appeared in Diamond’s Dialogue magazines for October and November. The August and September 1997 Final Order Shares have been added to their respective pages and will eventually be added to the market shares graphics.
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 upcoming release, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – The High Country. Read more about them at his fiction site.
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