Comics sales ahead for year after $49.4 million October; Batman, Walking Dead’s 15th anniversary drive month

As predicted here, comics and graphic novel orders through Diamond Comics Distributors ended October ahead for the year-to-date, thanks to a stronger midsection of 2018 and one additional New Comic Book Day during the month. Retailers ordered $49.39 million in comics and graphic novels in October, up 8.4% year-over-year; year-to-date orders stand at $438.4 million, up $1.6 million (or 0.4%) over the past year. Click to visit our page for October 2018 comics sales estimates; the figures will be posted there on Monday.

It has been a slow and steady climb — the first time the year-to-date figure has been positive since December 2016. And while November 2018 is up against a month from last year with one more shipping week, December 2017‘s sales were low enough that 2018 overall has a good chance of eking out a modest win.

The extra week distorts the comparisons with last October, a month dominated last year by Marvel’s Legacy launch; Marvel, DC, and Image’s dollar sales performances all improved against that month. Marvel’s dollar sales of comics and graphic novels to retailers are up $6 million year-to-date; DC’s are up $4 million, and Image’s are back even. The smaller publishers were the last into the recession; publishers seem to be exiting it in the same order they went in.

October was generally without the major launches that previous months saw; the major event for the month was Walking Dead Day on Oct. 13, which saw 15 different “blind bag” editions of previous issues (along with new variant covers) on offer. Batman #56, with its foil edition, finished first in units and dollars among comic books, with Walking Dead #1’s 15th anniversary edition in second. With fewer launches, the charting comic books were generally cheaper than we’ve seen — leading to a total shipment of comic books topping 8 million copies for the first time since May 2017, which had hundreds of thousands of copies of the 25¢ Saga #43 padding the totals.

Comics unit sales were up 5% in the month, bringing the year-to-year loss to a little over five-and-a-half percent, or about 4 million copies — though that shortfall is partially because 25-cent Image issues like that Saga edition were in 2017’s charts, as well as many more overshipped comics. The number of normally-priced comics that retailers paid their regular discounts for in 2018 is a lot closer to even with 2017. But there’s another factor inflating 2017’s comic-book unit sales: the number of releases. Through ten months, publishers have offered 4,732 new issues to retailers, a drop of 198, or 4%.

The Batman: White Knight trade paperback was the top graphic novel for the month in units; Wonder Woman Earth One Vol. 2 was tops in dollars. The number of new graphic novel offerings is slightly up this year; sales for the category through October were down less than 4% — down, but continuing to improve.

There were significant deep-discount sales promotions for retailers in October, manifesting in a nine-point gap in the comparative change statistics for graphic novel unit and dollar sales. Year-to-date, the categories are much closer.

Check out our lists below, and also our explanatory video:

The comparative sales statistics:

Thanks to its graphic novels and the Walking Dead event, Image’s market shares vaulted to near 13%, both for units and dollars. A consequence: Marvel and DC’s combined market shares were at their lowest level since August 2017.

The market shares:

The top-selling comics by units:

The top-selling comics by dollars:

The top-selling graphic novels by units:

The top-selling graphic novels by dollars:

Finally, the number of new items offered. The Image comics number is its highest in four years, but it’s partially because all fifteen of the Walking Dead anniversary editions would have been tabulated as individual releases:

Lastly, the chart at right is a pretty good visualization of the market over the last couple of years — at least in terms of its month-to-month status. It shows year-to-date performance, as it changed every month in 2017 and 2018. (It is not sales levels — it’s how the year compared to the year before at each point.)

You’ll see that 2017 started off softly, but that the year really lost ground as it got to summer, and the months where DC’s Rebirth issues entered the 2016 tallies. By August, the hole was dug — and things stabilized in September as Legacy began to ramp up: it’s also the first time I noted any hint of a change. It turned out we’d found something close to a bottom: the first months of 2018 are a bit distorted because January had a ship week that March didn’t. Beginning in April with Action #1000, the market began a long, more or less steady trek to claw its way out of the red.

So as expected, October put the year-to-date slightly ahead and November may well return it slightly behind, leaving December as the deciding factor. We beat December 2017’s sales this September by 17%, so the prospects for a sixth up year in seven remain good. Click to see what we know about November and December sales so far.

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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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