With the release of the 2019 end-of-year comics orders from Diamond Comic Distributors, Comichron has projected estimates for the Top 500 Comics and the Top 500 Graphic Novels sold by the company, which can be found on our page for 2019.
This year’s charts have our sorting and searching features implemented, as now do our previous 28 years of annual Diamond charts, going back to 1991. You can find the links to them, along with updated comparatives for how the market as a whole did across that time, by viewing our Yearly Comics Sales page. 2019 data will be added to that page when more is known.
Detective Comics #1000 led the list with nearly 575,000 copies sold, an increase of nearly 50,000 copies from its release month in March.
We can see from the end-of-year chart that Doomsday Clock #1 was the top-seller for December, with nearly 118,000 copies sold, and a number of other December items can be seen in the chart.
The rest of the month’s Top 5 appears to shake out as follows:
2) X-Men #3
3) Batman: Last Knight on Earth #3
4) Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child #1
5) Venom #21
We’ve generated a partial list that shows just the 37 titles from December, and we’ll of course run the full Top 500 when Diamond releases the next round of data.
Back to 2019: Almost everything in the Top 500 had “multiple order codes” at Diamond, meaning there were variant covers or reprints combined into one entry; sometimes it’s not a simultaneous variant, but rather a reprint with a different cover.
We’ll do our annual Top Thousand comparisons and extend the charts next week when the December data is released. But we have at this point finalized our Top Comics of the Decade chart for the 2010s, and we’ve added 2019 to the Top Comics of the Century So Far chart.
The final year of the decade added a large number of new entrants, 33, to the Top 300 for the 2010s. That’s one more than the previous year, and the fourth most all decade.
The decade’s bestsellers break down by year as follows:
2010: 8
2011: 23
2012: 40
2013: 27
2014: 15
2015: 55
2016: 44
2017: 24
2018: 32
2019: 33
Detective Comics #1000 was the big one, of course, placing second in both the decade and century behind 2015’s Star Wars #1. The best performance by another comic was Spawn #300, which landed at 34th in the decade and 42nd in the century.
2019 overall added 17 comics to the 300 bestselling comics of the 21st Century.
December’s report and estimates are up next, and our Top Thousand chart.
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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