{"id":4758,"date":"2014-04-04T18:33:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-04T18:33:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-08-01T15:03:16","modified_gmt":"2020-08-01T20:03:16","slug":"march-2014-data-comics-market-soldiers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2014\/04\/04\/march-2014-data-comics-market-soldiers\/","title":{"rendered":"March 2014 data: Comics market soldiers through winter with only slight loss"},"content":{"rendered":"
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With Captain America: The Winter Soldier<\/b><\/i><\/a> releasing today, comic shops have managed to soldier through one of the more wretched winters for weather in recent memory without too many negative effects. Diamond Comic Distributors<\/a> <\/b>released its preliminary data for orders from the comics ship market for March 2014\u2014and the month in overall dollars came in at approximately $40.7 million, just 1.48% behind the same month last year. (Last March <\/b><\/a>was also a four ship-week month.) That puts the first quarter at $116.6 million, off 4.4% from last year.<\/p>\n

Led by the new Walking Dead Vol. 20: All Out War Part 1<\/b><\/i><\/a>, graphic novels were the high point of the month, up more than 18% over last March. With close to a two-to-one ratio between comics dollars and graphic novel dollars in the Direct Market, that nearly offset the more than 9% drop in new comics dollars. Batman<\/i> #29<\/b><\/a>, at $4.99 this month, was the #1 comic book in an soft market for periodicals, but sales reports indicate that April’s Amazing Spider-Man<\/i> #1 may shake up that picture quite a bit. (It’s the third issue by that name, if I recall, not counting the one that came with the record album; the first one, from 1963, can be had for a mere $2,125 in CGC 2.5<\/b><\/a>, whereas the second one from 1998 runs for under $5.)<\/p>\n

The aggregate statistics are below. Don’t sweat the First Quarter 2014 versus Fourth Quarter 2013 change figures\u2014fall always beats winter in a blowout:<\/p>\n

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