{"id":3588,"date":"2019-07-12T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-12T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-30T16:10:25","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T21:10:25","slug":"june-comics-sales-slightly-up-led-by","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/12\/june-comics-sales-slightly-up-led-by\/","title":{"rendered":"June comics sales slightly up, led by Black Cat #1; DC released 24% fewer new comics in first half of 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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We can say two things for sure about the first half of 2019: DC<\/strong>\u00a0released a lot<\/i><\/b> fewer comic books, and Marvel<\/strong> came close to taking every shelf space its rival vacated. The result was that Marvel beat its own dollar sales performance from the first half of 2018, though not by as much as all those new releases would suggest \u2014 whereas DC’s total dollar volume slipped during that period, but not by as much as its fewer new releases would suggest.<\/p>\n

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The upshot? A Direct Market almost completely flat at midyear, down less than one-half of one percent in dollars. It’s a slight improvement from the trajectory seen in 2018, which was down a whole percentage point; that year’s sales wound up being strongly up<\/a><\/b> once channels outside comics shops were included.<\/p>\n

June’s comics orders, as reported today by Diamond Comic Distributors<\/a><\/strong>, were slightly up; retailers ordered $42.3 million dollars of comics, graphic novels, and magazines in the month, an increase of 0.4%. The year-to-date total, $250.2 million, is down a little over a million dollars. The quarterly breakdowns this year are near inverses of one another, with the first quarter up year-over-year and the second quarter down. This is in some measure an anomaly: If Detective<\/em><\/strong> Comics #1000<\/strong><\/em><\/a> had come out just a week later to land in the same quarter that Action Comics<\/em> #1000<\/a><\/strong> shipped in, both quarters’ performance would be close to even with 2018.<\/p>\n

Comics had a better month of June relative to 2018 than graphic novels did, with dollar sales for comics up 3.6%. Nearly 40 million comic books shipped to retailers in the first half of 2019, down about 2 million copies \u2014 but there’s little doubt that DC’s slimmer-offerings approach under AT&T<\/strong>‘s ownership was a contributor. Because while Marvel, on paper, replaced many of the missing DC releases, many of those books were reprints priced at a dollar, which neither sell as many copies nor for anywhere near the value of a regular Big Two release..<\/p>\n

Comparing the release slates. <\/b>DC’s 374 new comics in the first half of 2019 was down 24%, or 115 comics, from the same period in 2018. Marvel’s 615 new comics in the first half of the year represent a 20% increase, up 102 releases \u2014 not quite enough to cover DC’s shortfall. Image<\/b> published 301 new comics in the first half of the year, down from 376. The total number of new issues in the first half of the year stood at 2,704, down 3%.<\/p>\n

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The new-title austerity accelerated for DC in June, as it published just 50 new comic books in the month, a new 28-year low for the publisher. Marvel more than doubled its total, with 104. Marvel also more than doubled DC’s total output of new graphic novels in the month, 43 to DC’s 20. June also saw DC’s smallest new graphic novel slate since March 2015, and that could be an echo of the smaller new comics slate: when there are fewer new titles out, logically there are fewer issues to collect into squarebound editions.<\/p>\n

But, as mentioned above, there’s a difference in what each of the titles published contributed to retailers’ bottom lines. DC may have released 24% fewer new comics in the first half of the year, but retailers orders of DC publications in dollar terms were only down 5%, or about $4 million. It helps when there’s a Detective<\/em> #1000 in the mix; if there had been two, it’d be up for the year.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Marvel \u2014 which saw its June dollar sales up 13%, aided by the top-selling Black Cat<\/i> #1<\/a><\/b> \u2014 has moved 7% more dollars worth of material into comics shops in the first half of 2019, an increase of about $7 million over the same period in 2018. Why isn’t it larger, given Marvel’s increase in releases? Again, it’s what many of them are. Marvel appears to have released 59 different True Believer<\/strong><\/em> comics in the first six months of 2019; they account for more than half of Marvel’s slate increase, even though their $1 price tag means they don’t add a lot to the dollar totals. (Update<\/b>: Marvel also had True Believer titles in the first half of 2018, so the added number of True Believer books for 2019 is probably closer to 30.)\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

That’s something to remember when looking at the stats below: not all releases are created equal.<\/p>\n

The comparative sales statistics:<\/strong><\/p>\n