{"id":3502,"date":"2020-01-10T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-10T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-30T15:41:09","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T20:41:09","slug":"2019-comics-sales-increase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/10\/2019-comics-sales-increase\/","title":{"rendered":"Comic book, graphic novel sales to comics shops up 2% in 2019; Detective #1000, Watchmen top charts"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The decade of the 2010s ended on a note of growth for the Direct Market when it comes to retailer orders from Diamond Comic Distributors<\/a><\/b>. According to our analysis of a report released today by the firm, comics shops bought $528.1 million in comic books, graphic novels, and magazines from it in 2019, an increase of 2.23% or $11.5 million over 2018’s total of $516.6 million. We expect to have the full charts for 2019 from Diamond early next week. (UPDATE: They’re online, and can be found\u00a0here<\/a>.)<\/b><\/p>\n

Implicit in the report is that\u00a0December 2019<\/a><\/b>‘s performance was, as predicted here, an improvement over the moribund and holiday-shortened\u00a0December 2018<\/a><\/b>\u00a0showing. December 2019’s orders appear to have been around $39.5 million, up around 5% and finishing a strong quarter year-over-year. Three out of four quarters in 2019 showed improvement; that hasn’t happened since\u00a02015<\/a><\/b>, a year partially fueled by\u00a0Star Wars<\/i><\/b>‘ move to\u00a0Marvel<\/b>. The last time\u00a0every<\/em>\u00a0quarter was up was\u00a02013<\/a><\/b>, a year supercharged by significant line growth at the middle-tier publishers; only one month that year was down.<\/p>\n

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The performance for 2019 represents a return to growth for this subset of the comics shop market, joining 13 other positive years this century including 2001<\/a><\/b>–2008<\/a><\/b> and 2012<\/a><\/b>–2016<\/a><\/b>; two of the down years, 2011 and 2018, were off by just a single percentage point. Last year eclipsed not just last year, but the year before; this century only 2014, 2015, and 2016 have seen more dollars worth of merchandise ordered. Orders in 2019 were 25% above those of 2010, 8% higher when adjusted for inflation.<\/p>\n

Aided by Detective Comics<\/i> #1000<\/a><\/b> \u2014 a rare case, along with 2015’s Star Wars<\/i> #1<\/b>, of a first quarter release leading the year, dollar sales of periodical comic books were up nearly 4% in 2019.\u00a0Graphic novel sales were down 2%. Both figures represent significant improvements over 2018, which saw comics up 2% and graphic novels down 8%. Comics shops order significant quantities of graphic novels from channels outside Diamond \u2014 and as we know the book channel was booming in 2019, it’s a near-certainty that the overall market, which we track in our annual industry-wide report<\/strong>,<\/a> will find print sales above $1 billion at full retail for the first time ever. Look for that report later in 2019.<\/p>\n

Market shares: DC, Image line reductions make impact<\/b><\/p>\n

The market shares finished the year very close to what we’d predicted, with Marvel topping 40% in dollar share, an upward move of nearly two percentage points. Its unit sales increased by nearly four points. The unit gains came partially at the expense of DC<\/b>, which had pared back its line in the first half of the year; its unit share dropped a little more than three points. But its dollar share suffered much less, down only three-quarters of a point, indicating that the products it did put our earned more on average.<\/p>\n

Image<\/b>, which also cut back its offerings significantly in 2019, saw both its unit and dollar shares each drop by a couple of points. Dark Horse, Boom, Dynamite, <\/b>and Viz<\/b> saw their dollar shares increase. The only change in the order of the Top 10 in the dollar rankings came at ninth and tenth place, where Oni<\/b> and Titan<\/b> reversed positions.<\/p>\n

The market shares:<\/b><\/p>\n