2021 End-of-year, October-December Diamond estimates online


A huge tranche of data available now at Comichron! First, we have the Top 1000 comics and graphic novels from Diamond on
our 2021 page.

News since Friday: with variants merged, House of Slaughter #1 moved into first by 29 copies. A photo finish or a dead heat — it’s really just a snapshot in time at Diamond, where a week of reorders or damage returns or just about anything could have reversed the order. Less than a case of copies separating them! Merging BRZRKR #1 variants also improved its position. Rankings are fun, but here’s the important stuff.

Based on Diamond’s Top 4000 comics and Top 4000 graphic novels, 2021 was a huge year for comics shops — up 36% to $600 million — and specifically for comic books, which sold nearly 50% more copies. Diamond’s end-of year report revealed what share of Marvel’s business Diamond retained after Oct. 1.

Comparing before-and-after on titles suggests Diamond kept around 36% of Marvel’s unit sales of comics. If that ratio holds, Diamond stands to remain the top distributor in 2022.

Steve Geppi said Diamond kept 45% of Marvel: likely that’s the number of ordering accounts, as smaller accounts were more likely to stay. This has ramifications for Diamond’s future monthly charts: basically, just triple Marvel’s sales to get the whole.

While Diamond has not released monthly charts for October through December, we’ve used the 2021 end-of-year data to reverse-engineer charts for those months. These are different from usual as they include reorders, but they provide a good idea of the real rankings.

Here’s October, the first month of Marvel’s deal with Penguin Random House. Two heavy hitters, House of Slaughter #1 and Gunslinger Spawn #1 led Diamond. Amazing Spider-Man #75 likely sold 145k overall, third place if all Marvel’s sales were at Diamond.   Now, Comichron already had projections for October, including DC. We’ll use the 2021 end-of-year data to revise those rankings, although again there’s a bit of a difference because these October stats include orders from November and December. Look for it later on.

November is when Diamond was hit with that ransomware attack, and here there’s really no guarantee that the comics listed for November all shipped in the calendar month. What’s the Furthest Place from Here #1 from Image led the Diamond chart. Right off, we see Venom #1 surely would have been tops at Diamond had all copies been available there: we project 162,000 copies for it, based on Diamond’s data. We’ll get to that when we get our all-industry projections, including DC, done for November. Stay tuned on that one.

Finally, December was led by Stray Dogs Dog Days #1. It still would have been #1 regardless: Venom #2, Marvel’s best, placed 11th and would have been in second place had all copies been sold by Diamond.

Again, these are not the monthly reports Diamond normally serves: they’re culled from its end-of-year Top 4000 lists, so anything not on those lists doesn’t appear. Reorders of copies from earlier months don’t appear either, because there’s no way to tell what month they sold in. We can also use this process to backfill and advise our reports for other missing months like January through May 2021. It’s not known whether Diamond will release full monthly reports for any of this; if they do, we’ll certainly post them.

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