{"id":3489,"date":"2020-01-17T16:47:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-17T16:47:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-30T15:39:50","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T20:39:50","slug":"december-2019-comics-and-graphic-orders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/17\/december-2019-comics-and-graphic-orders\/","title":{"rendered":"December 2019 comics and graphic orders up 9%; House of X\/Powers of X top dollar GN"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Led by Doomsday Clock<\/i> #12<\/a><\/b> and the House of X\/Powers of X<\/i> hardcover<\/a><\/b>, comics shop orders of comic books and graphic novels from Diamond Comic Distributors<\/a><\/b> closed 2019 out strongly, up 9.2% year-over-year in dollars in December. That’s a better-than-expected total, due to a revision Diamond’s made since its end-of-year report came out last Friday. (The distributor’s December report, showing the new 2019 percentage change total, is here<\/a><\/b>.)<\/p>\n

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\"<\/span>When Diamond released its Top 500 Comics and Top 500 Graphic Novels lists earlier in the week (see our estimates for their sales here<\/a><\/b>), that provided us with a partial list for December \u2014 37 comic books released in the month made the overall charts. We temporarily posted those on our December 2019 page<\/a><\/b> (where the final estimates will appear next week), but we also spotted that something was a bit amiss with a handful of those entries, as their dollar sales rankings in the overall 2019 chart suggested they hadn’t made any money.<\/p>\n

That obviously wasn’t the case, and neither was there likely to have been any secret overship; rather, the fact that all the impacted books were Christmas Day releases points to an accounting issue. If those\u00a0Christmas Day comics \u2014 including\u00a0Venom<\/i> #21<\/a><\/b>, Incoming<\/i> #1<\/a><\/b>, Dr. Strange<\/i> #1<\/a><\/b>, and Spider-Ham<\/i> #1<\/a>\u00a0<\/b>had\u00a0their dollar earnings attributed to January 2020 rather than December 2019, where their units were rightfully counted, that would cover the difference in the percentage change statistics.<\/p>\n

Diamond appears to have caught that in compiling its December charts. The units didn’t change in the end-of-year statistics. It meant the addition of about one and a half million dollars to 2019’s total sales overall, boosting the year-to-year increase from 2.23% to 2.54%. (End-of-year dollar market shares would also theoretically be impacted, although very slightly.)<\/p>\n

To be clear, these aren’t comics that went on sale Jan. 1 that would have been affected \u2014 they’re December books, so nothing is being borrowed from 2020. And nothing else from the 2019 unit sales charts\u00a0<\/b>would be likely to change in this scenario: just the dollar rankings.\u00a0This means that we’re able to provide, below, unit sales with the Top 10 when it comes to the comics. (And the rest of the Top 37 are, again, here<\/a><\/b>, to be joined next week by the rest of the month.)<\/p>\n

(EDIT: Shortly after this post, Diamond confirmed the above undercounts of invoiced dollars during the skip weeks, and issued revised end-of-year Top Sellers and Market Shares \u2014 which, as expected, only added the missing dollar rankings and fractions of percentage points, mostly to Marvel. You can see the revised 2019 charts with our estimates here<\/a><\/b>.)<\/i><\/p>\n

The percentage changes from December, with the new, revised totals year-to-year:<\/p>\n