{"id":4028,"date":"2018-02-09T16:37:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-09T16:37:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-30T17:48:53","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T22:48:53","slug":"fifth-week-helps-january-comics-sales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/09\/fifth-week-helps-january-comics-sales\/","title":{"rendered":"Fifth week helps January comics sales arrest slide; Doomsday Clock #3 leads big month for DC"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A fifth shipping week in January helped reduce the year-to-year drop in Direct Market sales to the smallest dropoff we’ve seen since last spring, just under 2%, according to information released today by Diamond Comic Distributors<\/b>. We’ve been reporting reorders and advance reorders for January comics<\/a><\/b>\u00a0at Comichron<\/b> for weeks now; now, we finally have a look at how those reorders relate to overall sales.<\/p>\n

The quick line on the month is that DC had a strong opening to the year<\/b>; the internal math suggests DC’s dollar sales were up 15% over its total for January 2017, aided by the chart-topping Doomsday Clock<\/i> #3<\/a><\/b> and Dark Nights Metal<\/i> #5<\/a><\/b>. Marvel<\/b> was off, but high-single digits against what was a very unusual month for it last year.<\/p>\n

And that’s an important matter: It’s critical, first off, to ignore out of hand the unit sales drop, because January 2017 was the month that Marvel offered free overships of its entire line, distorting that category of the charts. Diamond shipped 6.71 million comic books to retailers in the month; to find a comparable figure without the overships we need to go back to January 2016, in which a little over 7 million comics were shipped.<\/p>\n

Second, five-week Januaries are actually more rare than the calendar would suggest, because often the January 2 ship day has been counted as part of December. We have to go back to 2008, ten years earlier, for another January where Diamond counted all five New Comics Days as being part of the month. (January 2018’s sales were up 14% over January 2008.)<\/p>\n

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But the fifth week does not appear to have added much at all in terms of new comics releases; they were just up 5%, and at 478 new comic books that’s the lowest number of new comics out per week since before 2015. Marvel only put out one more comic book in January than December, which had one less week. Dark Horse<\/b>‘s 10 new comics for the month appears to be a 21st century low (though it had the top graphic novel by units in The Legend of Korra<\/a>: Turf Wars Part 2<\/a><\/i><\/b>, as we’ll see below).<\/p>\n

Graphic novels, meanwhile, were where publishers shifted their attention for the month, with 23% more new titles shipping this January versus last. The result was a better month for graphic novels relative to comics, about with 560,000 copies shipping versus 527,000 last January. In dollar terms, graphic novels were up 4%.<\/p>\n

While the “dead quarter” pattern has been subverted in recent years, the first quarter of the year has generally seen fewer new high-profile offerings than in other times of the year; sales volumes are simply lower, and trends seen now \u2014 positive or negative \u2014 will have less effect on the year overall. The fact that DC has entered the year with momentum, however, does distinguish this year from last, and the fact that a new Robert Kirkman series is slated to debut in March<\/a><\/b> could change the picture further.<\/p>\n

Here’s the comparative sales stats:<\/p>\n