What’s the best-selling comic book in the last dozen years? What’s the worst-selling top-seller? There’s a reference for that now — as the Comichron “book of records,” long-delayed, is finally beginning on site, with the Diamond Era Records page now online. Covering April 1997 to present, it’s a first step — and it includes, beyond high-and-low-selling issues and months, info on highest average prices and market share peaks for the major companies.
We find that the Obama Amazing Spider-Man issue, which does indeed look to land around the 353,000-copy direct sales mark, looks to be the best-seller since December 1997, and Image’s Darkness #11, which had preorders of 357,000 copies across 11 covers. Missed it by that much!
Obviously, this is a page which will grow and be amended over time. There is also an all-time page in the works. And follow the caveats on the page; the records here are derived from estimates using the Diamond data, and thus include nothing else, like a comic’s sales on the newsstand. Both Pokémon #1 and Ultimate Spider-Man #1 had significant external sales, for example — and we have no way of adding for sure what the Obama Spidey’s newsstand sales were as of yet.
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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