Brightest Day followed Blackest Night into the top slot on the charts, according to preliminary data released for April by Diamond Comic Distributors. The Top 100 Comics and Trade Paperbacks for April as ordered by comics shops in North America, along with market shares and order index numbers, appear on Comichron here.
Brightest Day #0 joined with the new Flash title, Green Lantern #53, and Batman and Robin #11 to give DC the top four slots on the chart. Marvel led in both dollar and unit market shares overall, helped by the top-ordered graphic novel, the hardcover Kick-Ass compilation. It was the second month in a row for the title to top the charts; the film based on the comic book released in mid-April. There’s no new Siege issue in April (apart from the tie-ins).
At this stage we can tell that both the median and most common cover prices of comic books in the Top 100 was $3.99, with the weighted average cost being $3.47. March saw the first time the most common price of comics offered reached $3.99; April seems set to repeat that.
Full estimates will be appear here on the site later, after all data has been released; judging from what we’ve seen so far, it looks like a solid month but perhaps not quite what the five-ship-week March was. On the other hand, April 2009 wasn’t that noteworthy, beyond seeing Detective Comics top the charts for what was likely the first time ever. The comparatives aren’t that steep.
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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