December 2016 comics sales estimates online; all new Comichron charts are now sortable, searchable!

This morning, Diamond Comic Distributors released its detailed report on comics and graphic novels ordered by North American comics shops in December, and here at Comichron we’ve completed our estimates based on it. Click to see our comics sales estimates for December 2016.

I wrote yesterday about December and how its lackluster performance nonetheless brought the Direct Market year to a positive conclusion overall, up $1.7 million over last year — but allow a quick digression here on the presentation of the tables here at Comichron.

We are, as you may have seen, in the middle of a redesign, our first since 2008 — and unlike that event, forced hurriedly by the failure of a previous content management system, the new look for the site is the result of a lot of thought into how I can get more data — and I have much that is unpublished — online more efficiently and in a more useful manner.

To that end, I’ve made changes to my workflow, automating many file preparation steps that for 20 years on the spreadsheet side have been done by hand. On the web side, the styles for the tables — which once came in with lots of bric-a-brac courtesy of Microsoft Excel — have been standardized across the site. Only a handful of recent months have the new design, but each file is about half the size of its previous incarnation, loading faster. (You may need to hit refresh on some pages to see the new versions.)

More importantly, the new issue-level data tables are now all sortable by column. You can resort and reverse ranks by dollar rank, title, issue number, price, publisher, and number of units sold. Every column, essentially!

And as a bonus, while it’s hard to make multiple column tables too mobile-friendly without a database involved, it is now possible to show only a small number of entries at a time and page through them.

The Top 300 pages currently default to loading the entire charts, although that may change; the end-of year charts like 2015, already upgraded, display 250 entries at a time, unless you use the pull-down menu to request the full list.

There’s a search box, as well; if you’re looking for just titles with the name “Batman” in them, it’ll limit to that.

Beyond that, we’ve added some cosmetic and informational updates. Table entries appear in alternating colors, with a mouse-over highlight. And while we don’t as yet have the capacity to output title histories (there are several complicated reasons for that), there are a couple of methods now for determining what book you’re looking at the record for. Comics title links initiate a search for  the title and issue number at MyComicShop.com, while graphic novel links do the same for books at Amazon. (And yes, Comichron does earn a small amount as an affiliate from purchases made in both places; it’s all put back into the hosting of the site and the development of new research collections. Reader purchases at MyComicShop for the last several years have gone directly into purchases of comics to complete our Statement of Ownership data collection.) Links atop each table also lead to the Comic Shop Locator Service.

There’s one more step that’s been made a lot easier by the change: presenting the monthly sales report in the blog, previously the arduous by-hand final step in the process. And that brings us back to December 2016, and the following aggregate data:

The above information allows us to calculate that the average price for all comics in the Top 300 this year was $3.89, with the average weighted price down to $3.85. That’s an eleven-cent drop year-over-year for the latter category, something that happened once before in 2011 when DC did its previous price fallback. Click to see cover prices across time.
The 300th place title chart — also refitted — has a new column, telling whether a month was a four-week or a five-week month in shipping terms. December’s 300th-place sales levels, as you can see, were the second worst for the year, beating only February; winter started early in a lot of places, and the comics market was one of them.

As noted yesterday, one of the larger-selling titles, Red Sonja #0
from Dynamite, does not appear in the Top 300 but is counted with the
overall unit sales for the month, and increased the company’s unit
market share by nearly six points. Marvel also offered large overships
of free copies on several titles: you can see the wide disparity between
the unit sales rankings and the dollar sales rankings for titles
including Hawkeye, Gamora, Guardians of the Galaxy, Rocket Raccoon, Nova, Mighty Captain Marvel, Star-Lord, and
others. Overships do not impact dollar market share, which is the more
meaningful category; you can get an idea of the biggest earners for the
month by sorting by dollar rank.

Which, I am delighted to say, you can now do here. It will take some time to retrofit all the previous pages with the new format — there are more than 270 monthly and yearly reports! — but it’ll happen. You can see the yearly sales changes at the updated Yearly Comics home page — and you may note we’ve created a new Postal Data Repository, where big things will be happening. Yes, tables I haven’t updated in nearly a decade are about to get a lot of new entries…

…but only after 2016’s business is concluded. Which should happen here next week, when Diamond releases its top sellers list for the year. To be alerted when that happens, follow Comichron on Twitter or Facebook.

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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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