October 2021 preliminary charts now online

With Diamond in another sales chart pause due to November’s ransomware attack, we’ve again drawn on our retail initial order dataset to fill in the blanks, starting with our October all-industry chart, led by Boom’s House of Slaughter #1. Find the report here.

Like our charts from previous pauses, they’re rankings only — but because we had four months of Diamond reporting from June to September, the underlying estimates for many ongoing series are fortified by additional data. The model’s better with those than with first issues. We see an example of this in House of Slaughter #1, which Boom reported had orders over 460,000 copies. Our report doesn’t see a big gap between it and second-place Amazing Spider-Man #75, but that could relate to our model’s reliance on initial orders, among other factors. Different measures will find different results based on what they’re looking at, and how they’re looking.


For example, ICV2’s ComicHub report showed Slaughter #1 in fourth place — but it was looking at register sales thru Oct. 30, and the comic book didn’t release until Oct. 27. The attack hit at a critical time for the charts, as Marvel had just moved to Penguin Random House, and October would have shown how much of its sales Diamond kept. Steve Geppi said it kept 45% of Marvel’s business, but it’s unclear what that refers to.

Earlier this year, we posted our June all-industry projections, only for Diamond to get its own June report out; we incorporated its data into what we had. We’ll do the same here. Quite a lot of “work in progress” graphics on the site for 2020-21, but patience has paid off from time to time.

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