October brought the restoration of many Marvel titles’ legacy numberings (as well as the creation of several legacy titles through the cobbling-together of multiple miniseries) as part of its Legacy event. The promotion, which required retailers to meet certain thresholds to order special lenticular covers, helped Marvel and the Direct Market’s orders increase 5% over … Read more
Earlier this week in advance of the release of the Diamond Comic Distributors preliminary sales report for October 2017, I tweeted that the same month last year would be very hard to beat, even with Marvel’s Legacy event and DC’s Dark Multiverse storyline underway. The second best month of 2016 in the Direct Market, October 2016 had … Read more
With news everywhere today about writer Brian Michael Bendis‘s departure from Marvel to an exclusive multi-year contract with DC, Comichron presents a look back to the beginning of his run with the publisher. All the filings Marvel made with the United States Postal Service about Bendis’s flagship title can now be found here at Ultimate Spider-Man: The … Read more
This month begins my twenty-fifth year of covering the comics industry professionally (for those counting, that means the actual anniversary is November 2018), and I speak about a number of the datasets that I’ve been developing over the years on the new Off Panel podcast with David Harper of SKTCHD. It’s a wide-ranging discussion, looking … Read more
Just back from New York Comic-Con, an amazingly busy event — and while attendance numbers have not been released, the outside observer certainly wouldn’t have suspected it was taking place in a year in which comics and graphic novel orders had been, through September, down 10% in the Direct Market, as was reported here … Read more
I had mentioned on Twitter earlier this week that while last September was a strong month for the Direct Market thanks to DC’s Rebirth program, the month’s sales levels offered a relatively reachable target. While information released today by Diamond Comic Distributors shows that September 2017 comics and graphic novel orders, at $43.52 million, fell … Read more