Comics sales strong in April, highest Image share since 2003

It’s an incredibly busy day in the comics world. The Avengers movie is releasing; see our post on Avengers sales history. It’s the day before Free Comic Book Day; see our post on its history. And it’s also May-the-Fourth-Be-With-You Star Wars Day (and USA Today just announced my new Star Wars comics series minutes ago). So it happens that the monthly preliminary release of comics sales figures comes on a day when many are paying attention to pop culture — and the news is just the kind you want to see on such a day. Click to see the preliminary comics sales charts for April 2012.

Diamond Comic Distributors reports that comics shops in North America ordered nearly 14% more dollars worth of comics and graphic novels than last April; The Comics Chronicles has a preliminary projection of $36 million for sales for the month. The performance in all categories is slightly better than the performance for the first quarter, and as this is our first really clean month-to-month comparison of the year, it indicates that what we were seeing in previous months wasn’t a fluke.

With Marvel’s Avengers Vs. X-Men #2 leading the market and DC’s relaunch titles continuing, new comics orders continued to be up double digits — and the Image’s Walking Dead trades continued to dominate their category. Graphic novels are now up nearly 10% for the year; the laggard category, thus far, trade paperbacks may be poised to break into double-digits as the DC relaunch trades enter the mix.

The aggregate change figures:

Last month was the first month in the Diamond Exclusive Era that five publishers had topped 5% in dollar market share. That didn’t happen this month, but an interesting thing appears in the distribution of shares. We had six publishers with 3% market share or more, something that has happened frequently lately. But that’s usually been associated with those six publishers combining to sell more than 90% of the material in the market by dollars. This time, it was down under 87% — and we see that we’re very close to having 10 publishers with a dollar market share of 1%.

It’s possible in part because Marvel and DC only combined for
64.76% of the market this month — their lowest combined market share
since March 2004. Contrast the current figure with October’s 81.26%,
during the early weeks of the DC relaunch. Image’s Walking Dead-powered sales strength is a big factor — its 8.6% market share is its highest since February 2003.

As mentioned here many times previously, the recovery of the early 2000s was powered by a virtuous cycle of a hit from one publisher being followed by a hit from another publisher — so strength at middle-tier publishers is key to a recovery. But one difference in 2012 is that the trade paperback market is much more developed, so there is a place for retailers’ dollars to go even when there are months without a major event comic book. Walking Dead and other trades may be evolving into just that — reliable places for retailers to hold their cash and a hedge against month-to-month volatility.

Full numbers next week.

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John Jackson Miller

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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