I missed the actual date yesterday but on Feb. 1, Diamond Comic Distributors — the sales agent for most large comics publishers to comics shops in North America — celebrated its 30th anniversary. Steve Geppi, today When Steve Geppi began distributing comics and related merchandise to fellow shop owners on Feb. 1, 1982, the comic … Read more
Two months from today marks five years online for The Comics Chronicles, and while I’ve gotten a lot of comics history on the site in that time, some of the site’s own history has been absent. A database crash in August 2008 took out all the blog posts from before that time, and while I … Read more
Diamond Comic Distributors has released its lists of Top Comics and Top Trade Paperbacks and graphic novels for 2011, and as I did the last two years I have combined that information with my own estimates of aggregated sales of comics and trades throughout the year and other information to project longer lists, with … Read more
And in advance of the release of the larger lists for 2011, Diamond has released the Top 10 Comic Books and Trade Paperbacks of the year, plus the market shares. The Top 10 Comics for the year are not surprisingly dominated by the DC relaunch: RANK DESCRIPTION PRICE PUBLISHER 1 Justice League #1 $3.99 DC … Read more
Diamond Comic Distributors has released the full report for last month, and it completes the picture for the year for comics sales to North American comics shops. Click to see the sales estimates for December 2011. As reported here on Friday, sales of periodical comics to comics shops went up during the year: sales … Read more
It was close — very close. Comic books did what they were expected to do in December — but trade paperback novels do what they often do in December, resulting in overall comic book and trade paperback dollar orders finishing 2011 down by less than 1%, according to Diamond Comic Distributors. Click to see the … Read more