{"id":3680,"date":"2019-01-18T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-01-18T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-30T16:25:00","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T21:25:00","slug":"december-2018-sales-slightly-off-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/18\/december-2018-sales-slightly-off-on\/","title":{"rendered":"December 2018 sales slightly off on smallest new comics slate in years; DC’s 52 new comics its fewest since 1991"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The December report for comics sales is always a strange one, because the annual report from Diamond Comic Distributors<\/a><\/b>, which these days gets released before it, obviously has December data baked into it. From the annual report, we already know many of the top entries in the charts\u2014and from the indexed charts, we know how many copies those issues sold. (Click to see the Top Thousand Comics and Graphic Novels for 2018<\/a><\/b>.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The annual report also sometimes includes metrics, and while often they come from the monthly change tables, at other times they’ve reflected more complete information, factoring in sales not included in the monthly reports. (Read more about that dynamic here<\/a><\/strong>.) So it is that the December 2018 report arrives with some information already known, and a little more explanation than usual on a few fronts. (UPDATE: The sales estimates for all comics in the month are now online\u00a0here<\/a>.)<\/b><\/p>\n

Batman Who Laughs<\/em> #1<\/a><\/strong> was the top-selling comic book in December, with orders (already known from the annual report) of more than 226,000 copies. DC<\/b> had all five of the top five comics \u2014 yet in a month that was down 2% for the business overall, the publisher was down 11% in dollar orders versus December 2017.<\/p>\n

A possible contributing factor: DC only released 52 new comic books in December, which appears to be the lowest number in any month for that publisher since September 1991.<\/b>\u00a0(Click to see our\u00a01991<\/a>\u00a0<\/b>page.) Meanwhile,\u00a0Marvel<\/b>, which had 90 comic books out, slightly over its annual average for 2018, was up 12% in dollars year-over-year in December.<\/p>\n

The fact that more new titles being offered often correlates with higher overall sales may not be much of a surprise; at the same time, it wouldn’t be strange at all for publishers and retailers to prefer to have more profit coming in from a smaller number of titles that perform better on average. In December 2018, they got their way in that fully 11% fewer comic books came out versus the same month last year; at 398 releases, it was the smallest number in any month in at least four years. Yet the number of units sold in the month was only slightly down versus December 2017.<\/p>\n

However, that was not the rule during 2018 overall: we now know that 5,553 new comics came out in 2018, down 6% from the 5,919 in 2017 \u2014 and comics unit sales were down for the year by 6%.<\/b>\u00a0In 2018, lighter new release volume coincided with an equally lighter number of copies sold.<\/p>\n

The usual caveats with new-release volume measures apply. They count the number of unique comic book interiors, regardless of variant covers; the number of stories, if you will. Retailers actually were coping with many more specific items to order and stock; 87% of the Top 1,000 comics of 2018 had variants, and 97% of the Top 100. But the median number of copies of a single comic book purchased by individual consumers is still one; total purchases do not increase in parallel with the number of variants, because most people just want one copy to read. It’s the fact that that “one copy” might not be the main cover that makes retailers’ lives more complicated.<\/p>\n

(The holiday schedule did play a role in output in December; Diamond limited Christmas week to a book apiece from major publishers. It did reduce slates overall, but not everyone’s: Marvel’s 90 releases were 11 more than November, and several other publishers were above their 2018 averages. The other weeks were just heavier.)<\/p>\n

Analysis of the monthly table grids suggests that the month came in at $37.61 million in comics, graphic novels and magazines shipped \u2014 slightly less than December 2017, possibly due in part to the unexpectedly small number of releases. That puts the year-end at nearly $517 million at full retail. The aggregate charts:<\/p>\n