We’ve posted the monthly estimates for February and March 2022, and there’s a lot of good news to them. It looks like the Direct Market had a $145 million first quarter, which beats the same three months of 2020 — our last winter with data from Diamond — by $28 million.
The Marvel adjustments are in there — and I additionally took a look at how the independent comics are doing compared with what they did when Marvel and DC were fully at Diamond. The news is startling. There were 737 indie comics that charted in the first quarter of 2020; looking at the Top 737 indies in 2022 in the same period shows a unit sales increase of 67%. A lot of it comes from the fact that Image and Boom generated a lot of hits; the first-place indie in early 2020 would only place ninth in winter 2022.
So that’s a positive for Diamond, one supposes: between Marvel’s sales increases and those with the indies it’s pushing, it’s basically replaced DC’s periodical sales. It’s not enough to make up for losing two-thirds of Marvel, but it is something noteworthy.
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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