March is winding down, and while it saw rotten weather in the Northeast, there’s at least one anecdotal sign of thaw: Chuck Rozanski reported yesterday that the month to date is up 63% at Mile High Comics. That’s highly unlikely for the Direct Market at large in March, which is up against a month with one more shipping week; breaking even would be a considerable feat. But we can at least get a glimpse of what’s going on from the latest reorders and advance reorders placed with Diamond Comic Distributors.
Let’s look first at how the books already in stores fared, and move on to the future:
TOP REORDERED ITEMS for Mar. 19-25, 2018 (in invoiced dollars)
These are items that have already shipped, but have been receiving additional orders from retailers. In most cases below, the items are in stock and so the orders are being filled; occasionally items are back-ordered, so their reorders will enter into the channel once they become available.
These are ranked by invoiced dollars, so retailers’ discounts have already applied to the totals before ranking.
The $500 Marvel Infinity Gauntlet Box Hardcover Slipcase Set repeated as both the top hardcover and top item overall in reorders. It was a March 7 item. (Possibly not next week, as it’s marked as of today as out of stock at Diamond.) There were quite a lot of hardcovers in the reorder charts this time out, including Green Lantern Earth One Vol. 1, which placed second overall. It was released March 14.
Continuing the Thanos theme, the Infinity Gauntlet trade paperback was the top reordered softcover.
Oblivion Song #1 repeated as the top comic book reordered. It’s had that status three weeks in a row. It arrived in stores March 7.
The links in the table go to the Diamond information pages for each book.
And now on to the future…
TOP ADVANCE REORDERED ITEMS for Mar. 19-25, 2018 (in full retail dollars)
These are items that have not yet shipped, but for which the Final Order Deadlines have passed.
These reorders, if books are available to fill them, may or may not land in the same shipping month as the books’ release weeks, so a book’s presence on this chart can mean that an item might make a repeat appearance in Diamond’s monthly top-seller charts.
After a week in which Action Comics #1000 advance reorders pushed much else out of the advance reorder chart, Marvel returned to take 18 out of the Top 25 spots. The regular edition of Amazing Spider-Man #799, due out April 18, was the top advance-reordered comic, followed by one of its variants and reprints of two earlier issues.
The Ricanstruction: Reminiscing and Rebuilding Puerto Rico benefit anthology from Somos Arte was the top advance-reordered trade paperback; it’s expected to go on sale May 23. No hardcovers made the charts.
This chart is ranked by full retail dollars and not units, or wholesale dollars.
We’ve seen enough reorders and advance from the past few weeks from Diamond Comic Distributors to be able to collate some information onto pages for March 2018, April 2018, and May 2018. Check them out for a further glance at the future.
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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