Best-seller for 1991 (and all time!) This is the week for end-of-year lists, but the comics bestseller list won’t be out for a week or so. So how about 20 old lists, instead — some seeing the light of day for the first time in years? December tends to be the time of year … Read more
Following my quick analysis yesterday of the 1948 sales figures discovered by Tim Stroup, some have suggested that suggesting the industry is “more profitable” today is too strong. My old colleague from Comics Buyer’s Guide John Diser notes that advertising revenues would certainly have been greater; and Chuck Dixon reminds that publishers owned their own … Read more
Tim Stroup, cofounder of the Grand Comics Database and co-owner of Cold Cut Distribution, is one of those “like-minded archaeologists of comics history” I had in mind when I wrote my site’s description years ago; he’s a source for a lot of interesting information. Recently, he started a daily blog, Today in Comics History, which … Read more
As reported here on Friday, Diamond Comic Distributors has released figures showing that the Direct Market is into positive territory for 2011. You can find more details on what this moment means for the market here, but a few additional observations come out in looking at the complete table of estimates. Click to see the … Read more
It’s almost a done deal: 2011 will be the first up year for the comic book direct market since 2008, resuming the trend of the early 2000s and giving the industry nine years of growth out of the past 11. Diamond Comic Distributors released its November Top 100s and Comparative Sales Statistics this morning, … Read more
The Direct Market saved Superman’s world. Jim Shooter, former editor in chief at Marvel, has embarked on his blog on a discussion of the history of the distribution business for comics, delving into such fun buts of minutiae as affadavit returns. (See Chuck Rozanski’s piece on the Mile High II collection, a batch of … Read more