DC‘s Rebirth franchise allowed it to best Marvel in market share in July 2016 for the first time in nearly three years, according to new statistics released today by Diamond Comic Distributors. DC led Marvel in total orders of comics, graphic novels, and magazines in by a little over 1%, 35.36% to 34.20%.
That’s in dollar terms; DC, aided greatly by the $2.99 price on many of its titles — including market topper Justice League #1 — led units by 40.96% to 35.69%. Orders for periodical comic books were up industry-wide by 4.32% this month over last July, a month that had one more shipping week. That week gave last July a 3% edge in overall dollar sales — but that missing week suggests this month’s $50.51 million order performance should’ve been off by quite a bit more. So the market did pretty well against a tougher comparative. Last month, as we reported, was the best month for orders in the Direct Market in at least 20 years.
DC leading in market share is an uncommon occurrence, but it happens
more than you might think. The most recent DC lead was October 2013,
following a 12-point lead in September 2013, “Villains Month.”
It has happened 57 times since Diamond started reporting Final Sales
Market Shares in August 1997 — reporting that began in part following
the lobbying of DC, which generally did better in such shares than in
those for preordered titles and which indeed led frequently in the years
following that owing to its large jump on Marvel in the graphic novel
department and the smaller number of titles being released in the period
when Marvel came out of bankruptcy. (Marvel, by contrast, has led 170 different months. No other publisher has led any.)
Here are the July 2016 market shares:
| Dollar Share |
Unit Share | |
| DC | 35.36% | 40.96% |
| Marvel | 34.20% | 35.69% |
| Image | 8.15% | 7.56% |
| IDW | 4.49% | 3.00% |
| Dark Horse | 2.83% | 1.98% |
| Boom | 2.05% | 1.68% |
| Archie | 1.36% | 1.26% |
| Dynamite | 1.19% | 0.95% |
| Oni | 1.14% | 0.84% |
| Valiant | 1.06% | 1.03% |
| Other | 8.18% | 5.06% |
More recent DC leads have come due to events or the DC 2011 relaunch. December 1999 had DC’s largest lead over Marvel, more than doubling it at 41% to 18%. Notably, the combined Marvel and DC share this year has not much changed — it’s in the high 60s, perhaps a little more than in the last couple of years. The other publishers seem to be holding their own.
Again, the market was off nearly $1.5 million from last July — meaning that the gap between 2016 and 2015 so far widened to $3.7 million, just around 1%.
| Dollars | Units | |
| JULY 2016 VS. JUNE 2016 |
||
| Comics | -8.15% | -3.24% |
| Graphic Novels |
-26.54% | -35.83% |
| Total Comics/GNs |
-13.77% | -6.16% |
| JULY 2016 VS. JULY 2015 |
||
| Comics | 4.32% | 12.01% |
| Graphic Novels |
-19.12% | -28.26% |
| Total Comics/GNs |
-3.01% | 8.28% |
| YEAR-TO-DATE 2016 VS. YEAR-TO-DATE 2015 |
||
| Comics | -2.59% | -5.39% |
| Graphic Novels |
2.42% | 0.26% |
| Total Comics/GNs |
-1.08% | -4.94% |
“Rebirth” gave DC eight of the top 10 entries on the comics chart this month. All the DC books were returnable, so Diamond has adjusted their orders slightly downward to account for that; that’s what the asterisk means. By year-end, we may see that many of these books rank higher relative to other books for the year than the current ranking suggest they might.
| Comic Book |
Price | Publisher | |
| 1 | Justice League #1* | $2.99 | DC |
| 2 | Justice League Rebirth #1* |
$2.99 | DC |
| 3 | Batman #2* | $2.99 | DC |
| 4 | Civil War II #3 | $4.99 | Marvel |
| 5 | Batman #3* | $2.99 | DC |
| 6 | Nightwing Rebirth #1* | $2.99 | DC |
| 7 | Civil War II #4 | $4.99 | Marvel |
| 8 | New Super Man #1* | $2.99 | DC |
| 9 | Nightwing #1* | $2.99 | DC |
| 10 | Hal Jordan & The Green Lantern Corps Rebirth #1* |
$2.99 | DC |
Graphic novels were off by a lot this month, more than 19%; the category is more sensitive to the length of the shipping calendar. Monstress
| Graphic Novel | PRICE | VENDOR | |
| 1 | Monstress Volume 1 | $9.99 | Image |
| 2 | Harley Quinn’s Greatest Hits |
$9.99 | DC |
| 3 | Batman: The Killing Joke Special Edition HC |
$17.99 | DC |
| 4 | Star Wars: Obi-Wan And Anakin |
$16.99 | Marvel |
| 5 | Huck | $14.99 | Image |
| 6 | Southern Bastards Volume 3: Homecoming |
$14.99 | Image |
| 7 | Saga Volume 6 | $14.99 | Image |
| 8 | Bone Coda 25th Anniversary |
$14.95 | Cartoon Books |
| 9 | Wolverine: Old Man Logan Volume 1: Berzerker |
$16.99 | Marvel |
| 10 | Agents of Shield Volume 1: Coulson Protocols |
$17.99 | Marvel |
Finally, we see that new comic release volume was down by 8% versus last July; Image shipped almost as many new comics as DC did. Nine percent fewer graphic novels were released.
| Comics shipped | Graphic novels shipped |
Magazines shipped | Total shipped |
|
| Marvel | 97 | 33 | 0 | 130 |
| DC | 63 | 31 | 0 | 94 |
| Image | 61 | 11 | 1 | 73 |
| IDW | 37 | 13 | 0 | 50 |
| Dark Horse |
21 | 18 | 0 | 39 |
| Boom | 21 | 10 | 0 | 31 |
| Dynamite | 19 | 7 | 0 | 26 |
| Valiant | 11 | 5 | 0 | 16 |
| Oni | 13 | 2 | 0 | 15 |
| Archie | 10 | 1 | 0 | 11 |
| Other | 102 | 144 | 23 | 269 |
| TOTAL | 455 | 275 | 24 | 754 |
The final order estimates for July will be along next week.
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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