{"id":4230,"date":"2017-05-08T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-08T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-30T18:26:30","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T23:26:30","slug":"april-2017-comics-sales-estimates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2017\/05\/08\/april-2017-comics-sales-estimates\/","title":{"rendered":"April 2017 comics sales estimates: Beyond Marvel’s slow start, rest of industry growing"},"content":{"rendered":"
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<\/span>This April marked 20 years since Marvel Comics<\/b> returned to Diamond Comic Distributors<\/a><\/b>, ending the distribution wars and launching the Diamond Exclusive Era. While the move helped to reduce instability, the market was far from healthy, and Marvel itself was still going through Chapter 11. At the time, I remember hearing the head of a rival publisher had said “the industry needs a strong Marvel” \u2014 and that was certainly the case in that period, as the entire market remained in collapse for several more years.<\/p>\n

Today, the comics market is far<\/i><\/b> better shape than it was 20 years ago \u2014 any claims otherwise are divorced from history and reality \u2014 and Marvel’s position is vastly improved. (Its Guardians of the Galaxy 2<\/i><\/b> film just passed $427 million in global box office<\/a><\/b>.) Still, it remains the largest player in the market, and as such the impact of Marvel’s slow start to the year can clearly be seen in Comichron<\/b>‘s analysis of Diamond’s sales to the Direct Market for April. Click to see our estimated order figures for individual titles in April<\/a>.<\/b><\/p>\n

Diamond’s shipments of comics and graphic novels to comics shops in North America are off a little more than $10 million year-to-date at full retail, or 5.74% \u2014 but shipments of Marvel titles to that market so far this year are off closer to $13 million at full retail, and half of that shortfall came in April. Direct Market orders apart<\/i><\/b> from Marvel are actually up 2.5% year over year; had Marvel’s sales to date been flat, the market would have still been up 1.5%.<\/p>\n

These figures are derived from multiplying Diamond’s reported market shares for publishers by the overall sales of comics, graphic novels, and magazines, at full retail value, computed each month by Comichron using Diamond’s percentage change statistics \u2014 and while we track these internals every month, we generally do not share the figures online as the “horse race” between publishers gets far too much attention already. As a medium, comics’ race against past performance is the more relevant one \u2014 and there, Marvel had been improving over the last couple of reports; March’s data found the publisher still behind, but by the smallest year-over-year percentage drop since September.<\/p>\n

April, however, found Marvel up against a very strong comparative month in 2016. Only five times in the 21st Century has the full retail value of Diamond’s shipments of Marvel products topped $20 million; last April, which included Black Panther<\/i> #1<\/b>, was one of them. And while around the same number of Marvel periodicals made the Top 300 in April 2016 and April 2017 \u2014 94 versus 92 \u2014 ten of this year’s issues were True Believer<\/i><\/b> books, priced at one dollar. It cost $386.06 to buy one of every Marvel comic book in April 2016’s Top 300; only $344.18 to do the same in April 2017.
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\nSo while there’s the appearance that Marvel’s slate in April was the same size as in the previous year, there’s less money in play; even if ordering levels were completely static (which they aren’t) topping the earlier total would still be a harder climb. While it’s not an easy matter to parse what true order levels are in an era of overships and repackaging services \u2014 this month’s top periodical, Secret Empire<\/i> #0<\/a><\/b>, was in the May Marvel Collector Corps box \u2014 the computation method described above suggests April saw one of the publisher’s larger historical year-over-year drops in percentage terms when it comes to the number of dollars worth of books shipped.<\/p>\n

As noted here on Friday<\/a><\/b>, however, the sales season for 2017 is only really now getting underway; Free Comic Book Day, with its coincident Marvel movie release, has evolved into the start of the summer\/fall for comics, traditionally comics’ highest volume period. There is another very strong comparative month coming up in June, which faces off against June 2016, both Marvel’s and the overall market’s best month in the 21st Century in dollars worth of product shipped \u2014 and this June will have one less shipping week. But combining May and June will cancel out the calendar’s effects, so by midyear we should have a clear picture of how the year is trending.<\/p>\n

It’s worth noting as well that a significant headwind is coming from the graphic novel sector, and it’s unclear whether it’s attributable to any single publisher. The Top 300 Graphic Novel sales for the year, while still down, look a lot better than Diamond’s reported figure for the overall \u2014 but that doesn’t necessarily mean the fault lies in the titles in the “long tail.” As noted here many times, Top 300 sales numbers are regularly inflated by deep discounting. If there’s been more deep discounting this year versus last year, retailers could receiving the same number of books or more and the wholesale dollar value could still be down.<\/p>\n

Specific to April’s charts, Marvel’s Secret Empire<\/i> #0 was the nominal leader with more than 162,700 copies shipped in North America \u2014 although readers will note that there are two entries which have their orders divided: Batman<\/i> #21<\/b> and Flash<\/i> #21<\/b>. The two issues each have a lenticular-cover version priced at a dollar more, and Diamond’s practice is to merge all variants except for those with different cover prices. (We saw this with the Combo Packs DC used to do.) Merging the entries would put Batman<\/i> in first place with more than 219,000 copies, and Flash<\/i> second with more than 174,000 copies. It appears Marvel’s issue would still be the #1 book in dollar terms.<\/p>\n

Comichron’s policy is to leave Diamond’s rankings intact on the monthly pages, but we tend to merge Combo Pack and similar entries when it comes to our various historical records pages.<\/p>\n

The month in capsule:<\/p>\n