Secret Wars #3 tops June 2015 comics sales; first half of year up 13%

The first half of 2015 is in the books, and comic books in particular put up some amazing numbers, according to data released on June sales by Diamond Comic Distributors. The comic book market continued to grow at a fast pace in June; its $48.7 million in sales meant that that the first half of 2015 was up nearly 13% over the first half of 2014. Comics retailers bought $282 million in comics, graphic novels, and magazines from Diamond in the first half of the year, an increase of more than $33 million over the same period in 2014.

According to Comichron and ICV2’s 2014 sales report released last week, when bookstore, digital and other sales were added to Diamond’s sales, last year saw overall North American sales of $935 million. Were the first half sales increase to persist and be seen across all categories, that would put the overall 2015 total north of $1 billion. That’s never happened before, although when adjusted for inflation the market’s peak year, 1993, likely approached $1.4 billion.

That said, the first half of 2014 was completely flat versus the year before it, so all the growth in 2014 happened in the second half. Comparatives are likely to get harder to beat as the year goes on.

The comparatives for the month:

Marvel was again the market leader for the month, and unlike May there wasn’t any major distortion to the shares coming from Loot Crate or other subscription box retailers:

Secret Wars #3 led the Top Ten charts, which included a number of debuts. Marvel and DC split the charts between them:

(Update: The asterisk stands for the fact that Diamond reduced Justice League‘s orders slightly due to returnability. And it turns out that Groot was part of the Comic Block, a new subscription box offered by Nerd Block. It’s unclear how many copies that would have added, though.)

Image’s Wytches led a graphic novel list that was split between Marvel and Image. Graphic novels were up dramatically for the month; we’ll have a better notion as to why when we see the rest of the Top 300:

Comics publishers released 453 new comic books in June, versus 424 last June. They also released 288 new graphic novels, versus 246 last year. June 2014 also had four shipping weeks, so it’s an even match-up.

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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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