{"id":4637,"date":"2015-01-19T18:20:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-19T18:20:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-08-01T14:33:43","modified_gmt":"2020-08-01T19:33:43","slug":"2000-for-2014-sales-estimates-for-top","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/19\/2000-for-2014-sales-estimates-for-top\/","title":{"rendered":"2000 for 2014: Sales estimates for the Top Thousand Comics and Graphic Novels"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

With today’s release of December comics orders from Diamond Comic Distributors<\/b><\/a> \u2014 and our subsequent analysis<\/b><\/a> and estimates for<\/b> December 2014<\/b> comics sales<\/b><\/a> now posted \u2014 Comichron has drawn upon that information to project estimates for the Top Thousand Comics and the Top Thousand Graphic Novels for 2014<\/b><\/a>. Click<\/b><\/a> to see them.
\n
\n<\/a>
\n\"http:\/\/www.mycomicshop.com\/search?q=amazing+spider-man+1&pubid=&PubRng=&AffID=874007P01\"The tables are on the page just beneath the image links to individual months. As
\nin past years, it is a large page, necessarily, so it may take a bit to
\nload. Also as in the past, I have rounded off estimates to the nearest hundred comics.<\/p>\n

Before launching into a discussion of what’s on the list, some more general thoughts on 2014, now that we’ve seen all the data:<\/p>\n

\u2022 Last winter stank, but it didn’t matter. <\/b>Headlines for comics sales in January, February, and March 2014 were dire in many places (though not here); the Direct Market was off 4% in the first quarter, overall, or about $5 million. But comics shops made that up in April alone. Across the next three quarters. the market was up 7.1%, or $28 million \u2014 allowing the final comics and graphic novel total sale for the year to be up more than 4%, or $23 million to $540.4 million.<\/p>\n

It’s a good reminder that not all sales seasons are created equal (especially not as January 2014 had one of its weeks given to December 2013 in the accounting), and that the amount of volume in the market is what matters. It is also a good reminder as we look ahead to the figures for the first part of this year, which will be infused by Star Wars<\/i> #1<\/b>‘s blockbuster sales: its effect is likely to be even further amplified given the lower amount of releases to the market in the winter. The addition of a million-copy book to a market that might only see 6 or 7 million copies sold in January could be quite significant.<\/p>\n

\u2022 2014 was not the year of the blockbuster \u2014 despite a new top-selling comic book for the century. <\/b>As noted further below, Amazing Spider-Man<\/b><\/i> #1<\/b><\/a> from April broke all sales records from the last fifteen years \u2014 but it was largely an outlier, as six months out of twelve the top-seller for the month was the book that leads the list when no blockbusters are around: Batman<\/b><\/i>. (Not that Batman’s sales haven’t been blockbuster some months in the past, just that it is the typical industry leader in non-event months.) This seems to have played out in the charts in general, as we see in the Top Thousand and the larger indexes that the upper tier books didn’t carry as much weight this year, even as comics sales overall grew.<\/p>\n

Here’s some visible evidence of the shape of the market, as seen on the lists. We find the following breakdowns for unit sales:<\/p>\n

\n
NUMBER OF COMIC BOOK ISSUES SELLING
\nAT LEAST THIS MANY COPIES DURING YEAR<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/colgroup>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\n<\/b><\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/b><\/div>\n<\/td>\n
200,000+<\/b><\/td>\n100,000+<\/b><\/td>\n75,000+<\/b><\/td>\n50,000+<\/b><\/td>\n25,000+<\/b><\/td>\n10,000+<\/b><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2009<\/b><\/td>\n2<\/td>\n39<\/td>\n119<\/td>\n379<\/td>\nn.a.<\/td>\nn.a.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2010<\/b><\/td>\n0<\/td>\n26<\/td>\n94<\/td>\n303<\/td>\n955<\/td>\nn.a.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2011<\/b><\/td>\n3<\/td>\n42<\/td>\n86<\/td>\n343<\/td>\n984<\/td>\nn.a.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2012<\/b><\/td>\n5<\/td>\n63<\/td>\n129<\/td>\n403<\/td>\n1100<\/td>\n2250<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2013<\/b><\/td>\n6<\/td>\n64<\/td>\n178<\/td>\n390<\/td>\n1128<\/td>\n2430<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2014<\/b><\/td>\n4<\/td>\n40<\/td>\n108<\/td>\n401<\/td>\n1195<\/td>\n2353<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n
Another
\nway to look at the above is: where does the 100,000-copy level start on
\nthe chart? In 2010, every book above 26th place sold that many copies
\nor more; in 2014, six-figures started at 40th place.<\/div>\n

As<\/p>\n

you can see, the upper tiers, above 75,000 copies, fell off
\ndramatically from 2013 to 2014. But the next tiers bulked up. The best
\nguess is that about 3,800 comics sold at least 5,000 copies \u2014 which
\nmakes sense, considering that’s about where the 300th place cutoff is
\neach month these days.<\/p>\n

Now to that list<\/b><\/a>. The Top Thousand Comics<\/b>
\naccount for around 52.07 million copies; that’s well over half of all
\nthe comics that Diamond sold. The figure is down from 54.21 million
\ncopies in 2013, though Diamond’s unit sales of comics overall were up
\n0.25%.\u00a0 In 2012 the figure was 53.43 million copies; in 2011, it was 47
\nmillion
\ncopies, and in 2010, the
\ntotal was 45.3 million copies.<\/p>\n

Using our database to
\nproject sales for other issues, it appears that the Top 2,500 Comics for
\nthe year sold around 78 million copies, down from 79 million in 2013.
\nSo the farther down the list we go, the more the unit sales picture
\nimproves.<\/p>\n

In full retail
\ndollars, the Top Thousand Comics sold for $201.03 million, a $1
\nmillion drop from last year’s total of $202.02 million. (See the 2013 article here<\/b><\/a> and charts here<\/b><\/a>.)
\nAgain, since Diamond’s dollar sales for comics were up 4%, it’s clear
\nthat the highest-selling comics were not where the growth was last year \u2014
\nbut rather, the titles selling fewer than 25,000 copies each. And it’s
\ngrowth from 2012’s figure, which was $191.4 million. (See the 2012
\narticle here<\/b><\/a> and charts here<\/b><\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Doing the same estimating for the Top 2,500 Comics puts 2014 ahead of 2013, $294 million versus $288 million.<\/p>\n

Once again this year, almost every single one of the Top 100 comics on the list had a
\n“multiple order codes” notation from Diamond, meaning there were
\nvariant covers or reprints combined to make the main entry.
\n
\n<\/a>
\nThe
\nTop Thousand<\/b> Graphic Novels,<\/b> led by Saga Vol. 3<\/i>,<\/b>
\nwent for $81.19 million, up from $79.03 million in 2013, from $71.4
\nmillion in 2012, and from $58.4 million in 2011. Combined, the Top
\nThousand Comics and Top Thousand Graphic Novel lists account for about
\n52% of the orders by dollars Diamond received in<\/p>\n

publishing last year, which was around $540 million. That percentage is
\ndown from 54% in 2013 and 55% in 2012. Again, the best-selling books are
\naccounting for less and less, even as the pie grows larger.
\n
\nTOP COMICS OF THE YEAR, DECADE, AND CENTURY<\/b>
\n
\n<\/a>
\n\"http:\/\/www.mycomicshop.com\/search?q=amazing+spider-man+583&pubid=&PubRng=&AffID=874007P01\"The renumbered Amazing Spider-Man<\/i> #<\/b>1<\/a> was the top seller of the year; Comichron estimates that, all told,
\naround 559,200 copies of the issue, including all variants, were ordered
\nby Direct Market retailers in North America. That’s enough to make it the highest-selling comic book of the 21st Century<\/b><\/a>
\nthrough the end of 2014; Marvel’s Star Wars #1, released last week,
\nwill easily surpass it, but we won’t see it on the list until Diamond
\nreleases its 2015 end-of-year data next year.<\/p>\n

So it
\nwill be a short reign for the Spider-Man issue atop the list \u2014 less than
\na year. The issue takes the spot held for five years by the Obama Amazing Spider-Man<\/i> #583<\/b><\/a>, with orders of 530,500 copies in 2009. You can see the updated top-sellers by year here<\/b><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The entire Top Comics of the 21st Century<\/b><\/a> list has been updated, and it has been split into lists for the decade of 2000-2009<\/b><\/a> and the decade of the 2010s<\/b><\/a>. One more comic book from 2014, Walking Dead<\/b><\/i> #132<\/b>,
\ncracked the Top 10 for the Century, landing at #8. It’s the third year
\nin a row an issue from the series has broken into the list, but this one
\ncomes with a dagger in our charts, noting that most of its sales came
\nfrom a single gigantic purchase by the repackager Loot Crate. While the
\ncopies were sold by Diamond and can’t be separated out, it is worth some
\nkind of footnote so readers in future years will know why this one
\nissue ranked the way it did.<\/p>\n

The Top 10 since 2000, up to 2014:<\/p>\n

TEN MOST ORDERED COMIC BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (up to 2014)<\/b><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
\u00a0<\/b><\/td>\nComic-book
\nTitle<\/b><\/td>\n		Issue<\/b><\/td>\nShip<\/b><\/td>\nPrice<\/b><\/td>\nPublisher<\/b><\/td>\nEst. sales<\/b><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1<\/td>\nAmazing Spider-Man (new series)<\/td>\n1<\/td>\nApr-14<\/a><\/td>\n$5.99<\/td>\nMarvel<\/td>\n559,200<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
2<\/td>\nAmazing Spider-Man<\/td>\n583<\/td>\nJan-09<\/a><\/td>\n$3.99<\/td>\nMarvel<\/td>\n530,500<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
3<\/td>\nWalking Dead (including Chromium edition)<\/td>\n100<\/td>\nJul-12<\/a><\/td>\n$3.99<\/td>\nImage<\/td>\n384,800<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
4<\/td>\nCivil War<\/td>\n2<\/td>\nJun-06<\/a><\/td>\n$2.99<\/td>\nMarvel<\/td>\n341,900<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
5<\/td>\nCivil War<\/td>\n3<\/td>\nJul-06<\/a><\/td>\n$2.99<\/td>\nMarvel<\/td>\n337,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
6<\/td>\nWalking Dead<\/td>\n115<\/td>\nOct-13<\/a><\/td>\n$2.99<\/td>\nImage<\/td>\n329,300<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
7<\/td>\nCivil War<\/td>\n1<\/td>\nFeb-13<\/a><\/td>\n$3.99<\/td>\nMarvel<\/td>\n328,500<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
8<\/td>\nWalking Dead\u2020<\/td>\n132<\/td>\nOct-14<\/a><\/td>\n$2.99<\/td>\nImage<\/td>\n326,300<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
9<\/td>\nJustice League of America<\/td>\n1<\/td>\nFeb-13<\/a><\/td>\n$3.99<\/td>\nDC<\/td>\n326,000<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
10<\/td>\nCaptain America<\/td>\n25<\/td>\nMar-07<\/a><\/td>\n$3.99<\/td>\nMarvel<\/td>\n317,700<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Uncanny Avengers<\/b><\/i> #1<\/b> and Civil War<\/i> #4<\/b> were bumped from the Top 10.<\/p>\n

Fourteen issues from 2014 made the Top 300
\nfor the 21st Century list, once again fewer than last year. Five 2014 issues made the Top 100, and four made the Top 50.<\/p>\n

THE PUBLISHERS<\/b>
\nWho published the Top Thousand Comics this year? Here’s the breakdown:<\/p>\n

Marvel: 512 <\/b>(+20 from 2013)<\/div>\n
DC: 407<\/b> (-3 from 2013)<\/div>\n
Image: 57<\/b> (+8 from 2013)<\/div>\n
Dark Horse: 14<\/b> (-4 from 2013)<\/div>\n

\nArchie: 4 <\/b>(+3 from 2013)
\nTitan: 3<\/b> (+3 from 2013)
\nIDW: 1<\/b> (-14 from 2013)
\nValiant: 1<\/b> (unchanged from 2013)<\/div>\n
Dynamite: 1 <\/b>(unchanged from 2013)
\n
\n<\/b><\/div>\n

That’s a pretty short list, with Aspen<\/b> and Boom<\/b> dropping out. Titan<\/b> made the list, thanks to Doctor Who<\/b><\/i>. Marvel picked up a bunch, while the biggest drop-off belonged to IDW<\/b>, mostly for the reason that My Little Pony <\/b><\/i>isn’t as high on the charts as it was in 2013.<\/p>\n

And here’s the publisher breakdown of the Top Thousand Graphic Novels. Those with 10 or more entries:<\/p>\n

DC: 393 <\/b>(+31 from 2013)<\/div>\n
Marvel: 251<\/b> (-37 from 2013)<\/p>\n
Image: 115 <\/b>(+19 from 2013)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Dark Horse: 88<\/b> (-3 from 2013)\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
IDW: 36 <\/b>(-6 from 2013)<\/div>\n
Random House: 25<\/b> (+8 from 2013)<\/div>\n
Boom: 19<\/b> <\/b>(+7 from 2013)<\/div>\n

Viz: 17 <\/b>(+1 from 2013)
\nOni: 10 <\/b>(+1 from 2013)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Marvel’s loss is almost the size of DC’s gain, and Image picked up a lot. Random House <\/b>and Boom<\/b> also made headway into the list.<\/p>\n

Walking Dead<\/i>
\nsoftcovers and hardcovers in the Top 2,500 added up to more than $6.5
\nmillion at retail \u2014 with comics bringing the total for the line up to
\nnearly $10.8 million. That’s enough to give it a market share of exactly
\n2%, which would make it once again the seventh largest publisher for
\nthe year, after Dynamite<\/b> were it a separate firm.<\/p>\n

COVER PRICES<\/b><\/p>\n

\nThe average cost of the comic books retailers ordered in the Top Thousand was $3.86, but that goes down to $3.79 when you extend the chart to the Top 2,500. The average comic book offered in 2014 only cost $3.72, so people are tending toward the more expensive comics. This may also explain why the books at the top of the charts aren’t pulling the same weight as they had before when it comes to number of units moved: the books atop the charts were more likely to cost more.<\/p>\n

With the December data, we now have a 20-year monthly track on comics sales. While average prices on the covers of all offerings (the black line) and the average price of all the comics retailers bought (the red line) have been increasing, we note that they haven’t been too far off what prices would have been if they followed inflation exactly. The green line below tracks what the average comic book at the end of 2014 \u2014 $2.25 \u2014 would have cost if it followed the inflation rate exactly:<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Since comics are linked to prices to other goods and services \u2014 like paper and ink, and what it costs to hire talent \u2014 it’s not too surprising that the average prices tend to have been a bit higher. And we can see that there have been times in which prices have increased faster than others: particularly 2008-2010, when major publishers tried to go from $2.99 to $3.99 in defiance of the general recession the rest of the economy was suffering. Comics publishers pulled back on price increases at that point. But generally, we might expect that a $2.25 comic book in 1994 ought to cost about $3.50 now \u2014 which it might if most publishers didn’t eschew half-dollar increments. We’re not far off of that.<\/p>\n

To a degree, some of the perception of high comics prices comes from a lack of collective memory about what comics used to cost: look back on monthly changes over time<\/b><\/a> and annual median prices since 1961<\/b><\/a> here. And the track of the green line above would be different depending on what year it started in: 1994 was a year in which paper supply was in great demand, and so that $2.25 baseline could already have been high. But there generally haven’t been many wild departures from inflation in the general economy in the last 20 years.<\/p>\n

Repeating the end-of-year report<\/b><\/a>,
\nthe comic shop market in North America ordered more than $540 million
\nworth of comics and graphic novels in 2014, an increase of 4% over 2013.
\nThe final end-of-year report, bringing in outside channels and digital, will appear
\nlater this year, but the comics portion of the figure is likely close to $357 million, with $178 million coming from graphic novels and the balance coming from magazines. You can look back on the 2013 Overall charts here<\/b><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

There are 23 other years of Diamond annual reports on the site<\/b><\/a>, going back to 1991<\/b><\/a>. You can also find comparatives for how the market as a whole did across that time by viewing our Yearly Comics Sales<\/b><\/a> page.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With today’s release of December comics orders from Diamond Comic Distributors \u2014 and our subsequent analysis and estimates for December 2014 comics sales now posted \u2014 Comichron has drawn upon that information to project estimates for the Top Thousand Comics and the Top Thousand Graphic Novels for 2014. Click to see them. The tables are … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4638,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[72,21,46],"class_list":["post-4637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2014-sales","tag-diamond-annual-reports","tag-record-setters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4637"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6411,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4637\/revisions\/6411"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}