April 2018 Comics Sales Estimates: Diamond ships 450k Action #1000s to North America

As reported here on Friday — and in our preliminary video report about the month — April 2018 represented a significant improvement in the fortunes of the Direct Market, thanks in considerable measure to a comic book 80 years in the making: Action Comics #1000, which dominated the comics sales charts — as its companion Action: 80 Years of Superman hardcover did the graphic novel charts. Thanks to Diamond Comic Distributors, we now have further information: click to see Comichron’s estimated sales for individual April 2018 comics and graphic novels.

The reader will immediately note that, while DC reported orders of 500,000 copies back in April, North American shipments in April totaled just under 450,000 copies. Reorders outside April, which are known to be significant, and copies bound for overseas would easily cover the rest. (Including overseas sales would defeat the primary purpose of the distributor sales charts, which is to tell North American retailers how many copies are in circulation in their geographic market. Read more in our FAQ.) The issue accounted for $3.6 million of all product ordered in April, somewhat less than the total amount of the month’s increase over the previous year.

But while Action‘s sales were monumental, it was not the whole story of the month. Six issues above 100,000 copies is the most seen in some time, and the top three sellers immediately became the top-sellers for the year so far:

April accounts for five of the top ten so far. Earlier issues continue to advance, with March’s Weapon H #1 topping 100,000 on reorders. You can see the rest of our running totals for 2018 here.

As reported Friday, Marvel and DC’s dollar sales for the month at full retail were up 19% and 18% respectively year-over-year, while Oni, IDW, and Dynamite‘s April-versus-April beats were even larger. Marvel’s incentive-copy targets were reportedly easier to hit in the month than they had been previously, which seems likely to have helped its performance.

Diamond shipped more than 6.8 million comic books to North American shops in April, a quantity that again reinforces the stability of periodicals in the market across time:

So that’s twenty years in a fairly narrow range. (We don’t know Diamond’s portion of the all-time dollar record month  April 1993 exactly, but all Direct Market distributors are suspected to have sold 48 million copies.)

Winter volumes are such that a good April can wipe out a poor winter; April 2018 didn’t quite accomplish that, but it did bring the year-to-date shortfall below 4%.

The vital statistics for the month:

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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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