{"id":4250,"date":"2017-04-10T15:13:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T15:13:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-30T18:36:02","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T23:36:02","slug":"retailers-order-114000-amazing-spider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/10\/retailers-order-114000-amazing-spider\/","title":{"rendered":"Retailers order 114,000 Amazing Spider-Man #25s, most expensive comic ever to top charts"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u00a0<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

\"http:\/\/www.shareasale.com\/r.cfm?u=296154&b=44882&m=8908&afftrack=&urllink=www%2Etfaw%2Ecom%2FComics%2FProfile%2FAmazing%2DSpider%2DMan%2D25%5F%5F%5F532191\"<\/span>Comics retailers in North America ordered nearly 114,000 copies of the $9.99 Amazing Spider-Man<\/i> #25<\/a><\/b> in March, making it both a million-dollar item at full retail and the most expensive comic book ever to top the monthly sales charts. That’s according to Comichron’s estimates based on an analysis of the latest information released by Diamond Comic Distributors. <\/b>Click to see the comics sales estimates for March 2017<\/a><\/b>.<\/p>\n

As noted here Friday, March was the best week of the year thus far<\/a><\/b>, helping the market to edge back to just a 3% loss for the quarter \u2014 a middling performance when it comes to the light-volume winter season. Ten percent more comic books were shipped in the month than in the same month in the previous year. A particularly heartening sign is that the 300th-place title for the month had orders of 4,812 copies, many more than last March’s 4,269 copies for that level.<\/p>\n

Fewer new graphic novel releases meant the category continued to lag year-over-year; in all, 6% fewer graphic novels have been released this year versus last year. Unit sales levels were down all along the Top 300 list for graphic novels, in part but probably not entirely because of these missing new releases. That said, the #2 book for the month, Walking Dead<\/i> Vol. 27<\/a><\/b>, had an identical number of copies ordered as last March’s\u00a0Walking Dead<\/i>\u00a0Vol. 25, <\/b>so there’s no apparent slowdown in that line. There was major deep-discounting on several books, including Marvel<\/b> hardcovers, so while those appear in the Top 300s, those don’t have much as effect on the market shares.<\/p>\n

There’s been online discussion lately about\u00a0Marvel’s performance at the end of last year and the possible reasons involved \u2014 but as I told\u00a0NPR<\/a><\/b>\u00a0last week, there are elements in play that make comparatives more complicated, not just for the publisher but for the market in general. As I reported at the end of 2016,<\/a><\/b>\u00a02015 saw a major publishing event \u2014 the return of Star Wars<\/i> comics to Marvel \u2014 that added $31 million that we know of in Direct Market orders to that year. The impact of that return in 2015 made it especially challenging for 2016’s orders for all publishers combined to keep pace, and they only just barely did \u2014 and Marvel’s Direct Market fourth quarter was down in 2016 versus 2015. But total Q4 2016 retailer orders from the publisher still appear to have increased quite a bit from the same season in 2014, before Star Wars<\/i> arrived at Marvel, so while the effect was diminished, the publisher still netted out ahead of where it was two years before.<\/p>\n

As mentioned often here, the monthly Diamond shipment numbers aren’t always the best metric<\/a><\/b> when it comes to evaluating the cross-time performance of individual titles; the aggregate figures are usually the better thing to look at. But 2015 falls into a small category of timeframes (including, most recently, 2011-12) with events so impactful that even the wider measures require comparative caveats for years to come. Those events may not always be decisive in looking at various trends, but they are part of the statistical environment.<\/p>\n

The vital statistics for the month:<\/p>\n