Venom, X of Swords lead September Diamond comics sales; market shares resume; full charts already online

In the second month since the return of sales charts for August 2020, the distributor carrying most of the comics released in North America, Diamond Comic Distributors, has announced its September 2020 top-sellers — and while comparative month-to-month and year-to-year sales statistics did not return, we did get market shares again — our first official ones from the distributor after the departure of DC comics to other suppliers this summer.

In a further change from past practice, Diamond has also cleared the full charts for release. We haven’t had time to add our projections to the data, but it appears on our September 2020 page for the time being. We’ll post the cleaned-up charts and supply our projected order estimates — as well as DC’s projections — later this week.

Venom #28 was the top seller from Diamond, with Donny Cates‘ Thor #28 in third; James Tynion IV‘s Department of Truth #1 placed seventh. X of Swords: Creation #1 was the top dollar book and the second-place one overall.

The September numbers found Marvel leading Image about 5.9-to-1 in units and about 5.2-to-1 in dollars; that sounds like a lot, but that’s actually a lesser margin than Marvel led Image by in March 2020. The difference then was closer to 7.6-to-1 in units and 6.4-to-1 in dollars. That’s likely attributable to Marvel’s slate still being somewhat smaller than usual post-pandemic — it had 76 new comics out in September, as compared to 99 in September 2019. Image’s new comics slate was at 46 issues, up seven both from March and last September. September was a five-week month in terms of New Comic Book Days both for Diamond and for DC’s distributors.

Here’s the market shares:

By contrast, here’s what the market shares looked like in March 2020, before the shutdown, if you remove DC from the mix:

Again, there’s no comparative sales charts, but there’s a quote from Diamond: “September was a fantastic close to third quarter sales for the industry and we continue to see a wide spectrum of publishers pick up momentum in the latter part of 2020,” said Tim Lenaghan, Chief Purchasing officer of Geppi Family Enterprises, the parent company of Diamond Comic Distributors. He continued by noting the strong performance of several titles, including Spawn.

Here’s Diamond’s top-selling comics by units, as well as the top sellers from each of Diamond’s other Premier publishers:

Here’s Diamond’s top-selling comics by dollars:

Here’s Diamond’s top-selling graphic novels by units, a list which is laden this time out, as last month, with many much older charts offered at discount. The top three graphic novels released in 2020 are in boldface below, led by Monstress Vol. 5:

And here’s the top graphic novels by dollars, a list which is probably the more reliable one to go with this time:

Here’s the breakdown of new comic book and graphic novel releases. We haven’t gone through the list fully, but we suspect that some of the Yen Press and other manga publisher releases might be “light novels,” which are not comics:

Again, Diamond has already cleared the Top 500s for release; they are temporarily here.  Look for our projections for Diamond and for DC soon.

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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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