When I launched The Comics Chronicles nearly three years ago, one of the major missions was to get all my earlier research into Diamond’s monthly comics sales online. Now, with the assistance of T.M. Haley, that mission is finally complete. Estimates from every month, from September 1996 forward, are now online. That’s 160 months of … Read more
The Diamond comics rankings and estimates for 1997 are now finally online here with the addition of pages for October, November, and December 1997. It’s a period that saw major drops year-over-year against some pretty big events — November 1997 unit and dollar sales were off more than a quarter (!) versus the Superman wedding … Read more
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
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
The April 2009 analysis is almost finished (though the tables are online already), but in looking back through the historical numbers, I found something that sheds some light on a frequently asked question: What portion of new comics sales is outside the Top 300? The only way to know is to have a look at … Read more
Very busy of late — thoughts of getting Star Trek circulation history notes on the site to coincide with the film release ran into time constraints. There isn’t much to be found in the Statements of Ownership, anyway, except for the single year in the late 1990s when Marvel had obtained the license for the … Read more