{"id":4017,"date":"2018-02-12T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-12T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-30T17:46:00","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T22:46:00","slug":"january-estimates-find-doomsday-clock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/12\/january-estimates-find-doomsday-clock\/","title":{"rendered":"January estimates find Doomsday Clock steady, Hawkman soaring; Comichron adds on-sale dates to comics charts"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Normally, ongoing titles see a drop from December to January \u2014 and a much more sizable one between second and third issues. But\u00a0Doomsday Clock<\/b> #3<\/b><\/i><\/a> saw its orders from December decline by less than a thousand copies, shipping nearly 158,000 copies to comic shops in January. That’s according to our estimates for sales of comic books and graphic novels to comics shops in January 2018<\/a><\/b>, now online here.<\/p>\n

As reported here on Friday, a fifth shipping week in January helped the month to the smallest drop in Direct Market sales to since the previous spring, just under 2%. DC had a strong opening to the year, with dollar sales up 15% over its total from the previous January \u2014 and we can now see that it had a notable success story in Hawkman Found<\/i><\/b> #1<\/b><\/a>, which released the last week of December with 64,600 copies shipped. The book was the top reordered comic three weeks in a row thereafter, moving more than 22,200 more copies in January and nearly cracking the Top 100 again.<\/p>\n

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Marvel was off year-over-year, but only by high-single digits against what was a very unusual month for it: January 2017<\/b><\/a> was the month that Marvel offered free overships of its entire line, distorting that category of the charts.\u00a0The publisher’s sales for Avengers<\/i> #678<\/b><\/a> were divided between the regular $4.99 issue in sixth place, and a $3.99 special in 282nd place; that latter edition’s dollar ranking reflects that it was shipped as a free premium. If combined, the issue would have placed fifth. The series had three more weekly issues release.<\/p>\n

It’s been a busy week for Comichron, and not just because our other report on Friday, on the end of DC’s newsstand sales<\/a><\/b>, quickly became one of our three most-read blog posts. In addition, we’ve just added something that people have been asking for for a long time. We now have included\u00a0on-sale dates in the monthly charts, starting with December 2017<\/a>.<\/b><\/p>\n

There’s a reason for the addition now: Diamond began reporting the Top 500 comics in December, which brought a number of reordered and liquidated comics onto the list. The dates serve as a necessary aid to identification.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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An excerpt from December’s updated chart.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Sorting by date is one method of isolating the new comics from the reordered ones; you can also look just at a specific shipping week, getting a sense for how titles with more weeks on the shelves benefit. Much of what is assumed is “attrition,” for example, is often a function of comics simply not having as many calendar days in which to sell. Sales in the following month may make up the difference in many cases.<\/p>\n

Some of the on-sale dates are after the original ones for the comic; that usually suggests that the issue is a later printing. We see a number of those among the liquidated comics, as supply finally exceeded demand for certain books.<\/p>\n

I’m not ready to commit to adding the dates retroactively before December, as identification wasn’t as much of a problem then \u2014 and I’m not sure how helpful they’d be for graphic novels, where multiple editions result in different on-sale dates. Plus there are a lot of other projects I’d like to get to! Let’s see how this works going forward, first…<\/p>\n

The vital statistics for the month:
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