{"id":5042,"date":"2012-09-12T18:55:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-12T18:55:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-08-01T15:56:31","modified_gmt":"2020-08-01T20:56:31","slug":"relaunch-takeaways-everyone-up-but-dc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2012\/09\/12\/relaunch-takeaways-everyone-up-but-dc\/","title":{"rendered":"Relaunch takeaways: Everyone up, but DC boosted industry most"},"content":{"rendered":"
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With the release of the August sales estimates<\/a> <\/b>for the comic-book direct sales market, we now have a full year of data following the DC relaunch to compare with the year prior to the relaunch. The Comics Chronicles<\/b><\/i> does very little in the way of horse-race analysis, breaking out individual publishers’ performance \u2014 but this is a topic of certain historical interest for the field, and the new data points allow us to do some calculations that are different from the “year-to-date” ones. We can compare relaunch to pre-relaunch months individually, and together, seeing what change occurred, and which publishers contributed the most to the change. <\/i>Several takeways:<\/p>\n

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Overall sales were up significantly.<\/b> Direct Market orders for comic books and graphic novels from September 2010 to August 2011 (a month that admittedly included the first day of relaunch sales, with Justice League<\/i> #1<\/b><\/a>) were $405.65 million. From September 2011 to August 2012, that sum was $461.42 million, an increase of nearly 14%. Justice League<\/i> #1 itself accounted for around $760,000 on Aug. 31, 2011, so if we shift those sales into September 2011, that takes the increase to just over 14% \u2014 with retailers ordering about $57.34 million more in printed merchandise than they did the year before. The chart at right compares the months to the year previous (and there we left Justice League <\/i>with August 2011). As we can see, only in three months did the pre-relaunch months’ top those for the same month in the year following \u2014 and in all three of these months, we were comparing a four-ship-week month now to a five-ship-week month then.<\/p>\n

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All major publishers improved.<\/b> By applying the individual publishers’ market shares to Comichron’s estimated overall orders for comic books and trade paperbacks in the two periods, we find that every major publisher \u2014Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, IDW, and “everything else” grouping \u2014 saw retailers order more material by dollars from September 2011 to August 2012 versus the year before. So there’s something to the “rising tide” theory \u2014 but not all ships were raised by the same amount, as we see next:\u00a0 <\/b><\/p>\n

DC is responsible for two-thirds of the increase in overall sales. <\/b>Including <\/i><\/b>Justice League <\/i>#1’s August 2011 numbers in its post totals, we find that the increase in DC’s overall orders accounts for around 67% of that $57.34 million increase. Again, every publisher finished ahead some \u2014 and some, as we’ll see, were ahead a lot \u2014 but DC’s totals contributed the most to the overall change.<\/p>\n

You can see its relative performance versus the market in the table below….<\/p>\n

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Overall comics and graphic novel sales in the direct market, versus one year before<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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