UPDATED to reflect new information
Diamond Comic Distributors has released the full lists for March 2012, and as reported here last week, while March itself was against a five-week month and slightly off, it
nonetheless contributed to the first time in the 21st century the direct
market has ordered more than $100 million in the first quarter of the
year. The Comics Chronicles estimates retailer orders of $33.7 million for the month; that brings the quarter to $101.9 million. (Click to see the charts for the month.)
Avengers Vs. X-Men #1 just barely topped 200,000 copies ordered, its numbers boosted by various special offers to retailers, about which more further down. It marks a return to the top of the charts for Marvel, after several months of DC leadership during its relaunch. The 300th place title was off by more a thousand copies; that benchmark is very sensitive to fifth weeks for obvious reasons, however, and it’s worth noting that the figure is higher than the four-week months on either side of last March.
It was, as mentioned last week, the first month since 1994 that five publishers — Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, and IDW — had dollar market shares higher than 5%. The percentage captured by the Top 20 publishers was the highest in years: just 1.55% of the items and 3.18% of the dollars were sold by publishers outside the Top 20. The list of the Top 300 Comics and the Top 300 Trade Paperback and Graphic Novels included only familiar names, which rarely happens.
There is, in fact, a disconnect this month when it comes to the Top 300 Trade Paperbacks
and Graphic Novels. While the comparative sales statistics that Diamond
released find graphic novel dollars off by 5.67%, the actual numbers
behind the Top 300 show a different picture, up 25%, or more than $1
million, over the same grouping from last year. Now, occasionally
strength in the top-sellers is offset by weakness below 300th place —
but a 30-point gap requires more explanation.
Updated: I’ve confirmed with the distributor that the aggregate change figures are correct, and that what I considered to be the most likely explanation for the gap is probably also correct. The Top 300 list contains a large number of trade paperbacks discounted greater than the usual amount, and since Diamond’s
market shares and percentage-change figures are based on wholesale and not retail dollars, it becomes possible that the retail dollar value of
trades stores ordered went up, while the amount of money they paid (the
total wholesale dollars) went down.
the publisher provides a dollar ranking when it lists titles on its site. Looking at the Wholesale Dollar rankings reported by Diamond, we see evident discounting on a lot of Marvel items this month. The Secret Invasion trade paperback, ranked 32nd in unit orders and 7th in full retail dollars, is ranked by Diamond at 136th place in wholesale dollars. So even if we didn’t know there was a sale – the numbers contain plenty of evidence of a sale!
The information is there — and from it, you can often ferret out
what titles were discounted more heavily, as was done in the Secret Invasion example above. (But note that it is not
necessarily the case that two titles with equal unit sales rankings and
different dollar sales rankings mean that one of the books had a
special discount. Different retailers order at different discounts, and
what’s paid for a given product varies from item to item by who’s doing
the ordering.)
There are often special
discounts figured into sales of not just graphic novels, but comics
themselves; as noted above, Marvel offered a significant promotional discount on Avengers Vs. X-Men
#1 this month. Diamond includes these unit sales in its rankings, but,
again, because of the wholesale/retail distinction, the publisher
doesn’t get the same amount of credit in dollar market shares that it
would if the titles had been offered at the regular discount.
Promotionally-cover-priced comics do
get trimmed off the lists at the Diamond level — nothing below $1
usually appears any more. But it’s tough to say what should be done
about regularly priced books retailers didn’t pay the usual rate for.
The Comics Chronicles‘ interest is how many comics are in
circulation, period, so it wouldn’t be good to see the numbers of comics
actually sold trimmed just for ranking purposes, as happened in the DC
returnable situation. (Those unreturned DC copies do end
up on the charts eventually — though we may only see them reflected in
the aggregate totals until the end-of-year rankings.)
Separate dollar rankings used to be provided by Capital City Distribution in its trade magazine, but the lists were never referred to as much as the unit-sales lists. The reason goes back to the purpose of the lists to begin with in the 1980s: retailers wanted to know how titles sell relative to each other, unit-wise. I suspect today’s internet readers still do. The feeling at
Comichron is that the item-rankings horserace in 2012 isn’t going to
matter as much to people looking at the site in 2022 — readers are just
going to want to know how many copies of a given book were in
circulation.
As always, every figure on Comichron is subject to change as more information comes in. The aggregate figures:
March 2012: 6.02 million copies
Versus 1 year ago this month: +1%
Versus 5 years ago this month: -14%
Versus 10 years ago this month: +18%
Versus 15 years ago this month: -30%
YEAR TO DATE: 17.89 million copies, +15% vs. 2011, -12% vs. 2007, +11% vs. 2002, -30% vs. 1997
ALL COMICS UNIT SALES
March 2012 versus one year ago this month: -2.45%
YEAR TO DATE: +14.74%
—
March 2011: $20.8 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: +2%
Versus 5 years ago this month: -7%
Versus 10 years ago this month: +48%
Versus 15 years ago this month: +4%
YEAR TO DATE: $61.6 million, +14% vs. 2011, -4% vs. 2007, +34% vs. 2002, +1% vs. 1997
ALL COMICS DOLLAR SALES
March 2012 versus one year ago this month: -1.18%
YEAR TO DATE: +15.85%
—
March 2012: $6.44 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: +25%
Versus 5 years ago this month, just the Top 100 vs. the Top 100: -7%
Versus 10 years ago this month, just the Top 50 vs. the Top 50: -10%
YEAR TO DATE: $18.13 million, +22% vs. 2011
ALL TRADE PAPERBACK SALES
March 2012 versus one year ago this month: -5.67%
YEAR TO DATE: +13.42%
—
March 2012: $27.23 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: +7%
Versus 5 years ago this month, counting just the Top 100 TPBs: -7%
Versus 10 years ago this month, counting just the Top 25 TPBs: +39%
YEAR TO DATE: $79.73 million, +16% vs. 2011
ALL COMICS AND TRADE PAPERBACK SALES
March 2012 versus one year ago this month: -2.61%
YEAR TO DATE: +13.42%
—
March 2012: approximately $33.72 million (subject to revision)
Versus 1 year ago this month: -6%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +1%
YEAR TO DATE: $101.81 million, +13% vs. 2010, +3% vs. 2007
One notable change is that the ten-year comparisons now extend out to the Top 50 trade paperbacks; Diamond moved to reporting the Top 50 in March 2002.
The average comic book in the Top 300 cost $3.48; the average comic book
retailers ordered cost $3.46. The median and most common price for comics offered was $2.99.
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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