Not an unseen Sandman tale, but four new (old) months added to the site: September 1996, January 2000, January 2001, and January 2002. September is interesting as it’s got the oldest year-to-year comparatives available on the site; they’re off quite a lot, as we’re comparing the end of “Heroes Reborn” with its beginning. The Januaries … Read more
Wall Street reports often speak of “market leadership” in tracking intraday rallies and slides; what’s happening with the big issues often drives the market. On the new comics racks, market leadership counts for even more — instead of thousands of stocks, we’re looking at a few hundred new issues each month. And as we’ve seen, … Read more
Diamond Comic Distributors has released its comics sales charts for May 2009, and while the actual estimates with copy counts will follow here shortly, you can see from the link that there’s an interesting change to the chart. Within the chart itself, Marvel’s New Avengers #53 led the list; there isn’t a new #1 until … Read more
When Marvel took its direct market comics distribution to its own distributor, Heroes World, in 1995, it was no longer possible to look at a single distributor’s rankings to see a real top-seller list. From then until August 1996, the only public sales charts that reconciled all publishers’ titles were based on retailer reports, such … Read more
A query on the Comics Buyer’s Guide boards about the historic nature of April’s first-place ranking for Detective Comics leads me to post a few additional details from the past, including information obtained by Russ Maheras from the only real source of data for the 1930s and 1940s, the Audit Bureau of Circulation. Marc Newman … Read more
Diamond Comic Distributors recently released its charts of comics and trade paperbacks ordered by retailers in April 2009, and as reported earlier, the market appears to have made up some of the ground lost in the first three months of 2009. Sales increases versus the previous year were observed in all categories, including, just barely, … Read more