{"id":3671,"date":"2019-02-22T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-02-22T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-30T16:23:38","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T21:23:38","slug":"january-comics-sales-start-2019-strong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2019\/02\/22\/january-comics-sales-start-2019-strong\/","title":{"rendered":"January comics sales start 2019 strong, up 14%; Batman Who Laughs #2, Conan top charts"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\"<\/span><\/div>\n

The holidays often make the charts for December and January vary greatly from expectations, and the 2018-19 season was no different. After a December that saw Diamond Comic Distributors<\/a><\/strong> take Christmas week off and DC<\/b> release a 28-year-low number of comic books, January came roaring back with healthy-sized slates from major publishers; it was the largest January, in nominal dollars, in the Diamond Exclusive Era.<\/p>\n

An early look at the sales for the month is below: on Monday, we’ll have the full January 2019 comics sales estimates<\/a><\/b>\u00a0online.<\/p>\n

The $44.9 million that retailers spent on comics, graphic novels, and magazines in January is more than $5 million more than last January, which also had five shipping weeks; that’s an increase of 14%. It even beat out the $43.75 million spent in January 2015<\/a><\/b>, the month of the release of million-copy seller Star Wars<\/strong><\/em> #1. <\/strong>Retailers bought 7.04 million comic books in January 2019, 300,000 more copies than the previous January. That’s around the range for the first month of the year for several of the healthier years this decade, though some of those Januaries reached the 7 million mark with one fewer shipping week.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

As mentioned, December’s sales were artificially low because Diamond did not have a full release week during Christmas Week: rather, a handful of select titles had been shipped to stores the Friday before, street-dated for the 26th. While those comics weren’t invoiced until Jan. 9, it does appear that the expected dollar value was figured into the December charts, because those Christmas-week releases have normal dollar rankings. It does appear that significant business that otherwise would have transpired in December occured in January instead; graphic novel shipments were up dramatically, 43% over December dollars and 12% over the previous January’s.<\/p>\n

If we’re looking for a measure that wipes out the holiday factor, consider the sales when December and January are considered a single nine-week unit: $82.55 million, up 6% over the same two months a year earlier. Comics unit sales were 13.25 million copies, up 310,000 copies over December 2017\/January 2018. The chart below shows the two-month combo across the decade:<\/p>\n