I know from experience that people are frequently looking to see the charts for future months before they’re released; until now, those requests have gone to a redirect page. But we’ve seen enough reorders and advance from the past few weeks from Diamond Comic Distributors to be able to collate some information onto pages for December 2017 and January 2018.
The problem with reorders is that they don’t synch up exactly with any given shipping month; they’re placed all the time and reported weekly, whereas comics orders are reported here monthly. Any given list will have a mix of titles from various months. So while the January page links to some of the more recent advance reorders, some of those items are for months beyond January (as is the case with this week’s top advance reorder book, Oblivion Song #1 I don’t intend to go any more than a month into the future with these landing pages, so the farthest-out month will simply collate the latest advance reorders.
Non-advance reorder charts, meanwhile, are going to be more relevant to the current month, since the books being reordered are on the shelves already. So the current month’s report, December, aggregates links to the most recent reorder reports, while also linking to some advance reorder reports from October and November, because the reported reorders relate to December-shipping books.
It’s not a perfect system, but it’ll do — and you’ll notice that the Top 25s are not being stored on those monthly pages. That’s because those pages will be replaced by the estimated sales charts once they become available. The reorder tables become less important then (especially because they don’t necessarily represent filled orders) so there’s no need to keep them in the permanent archives, though at least for the moment, they will remain visible as blog posts — like this one.
And let’s get to it. Here are the reorders and advance orders placed with Diamond Comic Distributors between December 19-25, 2017.
TOP REORDERED ITEMS for December 19-25, 2017 (in dollars)
These are items that have already shipped, but have been receiving additional orders. In most cases below, the items are in stock and so the orders are being filled; occasionally items are back-ordered, so their reorders will enter into the channel once they become available.
These are ranked by invoiced dollars, so retailers’ discounts have already applied to the totals before ranking.
DC‘s Dark Nights Metal #4, which went on sale Dec. 20, is the top reordered comic book.
In repeats from the previous week, Marvel’s Infinity Gauntlet was the top reordered softcover, and DC’s Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus the top reordered hardcover.
The links in the table go to the Diamond information pages for each book.
TOP ADVANCE REORDERED ITEMS for Dec. 19-25, 2017 (in dollars)
And now, a look into the future. These are items that have not yet shipped, but for which the Final Order Deadlines have passed. These reorders, if books are available to fill them, may or may not land in the same shipping month as the books’ release weeks, so a book’s presence on this chart can mean that an item might make a repeat appearance in Diamond’s monthly top-seller charts.
The top advance reorder item was the Oblivion Song by Kirkman and De Felici Collector’s Edition from Image, priced at $200; it comes with a statue, a print, and a pin and is limited to 1,000 copies. It’s expected to go on sale March 7. The basic comic version led all comics in advance reorders, placing second in dollars overall.
IDW’s Lights of the Amalou was the top trade paperback, and Boom’s Giant Days Vol. 2 the top hardcover.
Remember, this is ranked by invoiced dollars and not units.
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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