{"id":5084,"date":"2012-06-08T18:58:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-08T18:58:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-08-01T16:05:22","modified_gmt":"2020-08-01T21:05:22","slug":"may-2012-biggest-month-of-century-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2012\/06\/08\/may-2012-biggest-month-of-century-for\/","title":{"rendered":"May 2012 biggest month of century for comics market"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The comics industry is hitting on all cylinders as it kicks off its summer sales season. The month of May had Free Comic Book Day, the Avengers<\/i> movie, Marvel’s Avengers Vs. X-Men<\/i> event<\/b><\/a>, DC’s release of its first hardcover collections of its relaunch issues, and continued strong sales from Images Walking Dead<\/b><\/i> trades. The result? What appears, in early estimates based on figures released today by Diamond Comic Distributors<\/b><\/a>, to be a $44.7 million month for comics shop orders of comics and graphic novels \u2014 which would make it the single largest month in non-inflation-adjusted dollar terms since Diamond began reporting Final Order data in 2003. Click to see the preliminary rankings for comics for May 2012.<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

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That makes it the biggest month of the century thus far, in unadjusted dollar terms. Since my overall estimates became possible when Diamond began
\nreleasing its final order data, it isn’t possible to say for certain how
\na $44.7 million month stacks up against months before February 2003<\/b><\/a>. But the dollar totals at the beginning of the last decade were much lower than they are today, and if
\nyou don’t adjust for inflation, my expectation is that it probably is a
\nhigher figure than any seen since 1995, when there were close
\nto three times as many comics shops. (There isn’t much inflation in the new comics market itself in the last couple of years \u2014 average cover prices actually went down<\/i> in 2011.)<\/p>\n

It is also, regardless of the overall estimate, the largest year-over-year increase for any month seen since Diamond began reporting Final Order data. Retailers spent 43.76% more on comics and graphic novels this May versus last May. That percentage year-over-year
\nincrease, which mostly takes inflation out of play, looks to me to be the largest since probably 1993. Again, we’re just talking percentage increase: it’s not that this May’s sales are remotely comparable with that best year in the history of the business, or several of the years after it. But after 1993, the trajectory was mostly downward, and we never saw year-over-year increases of this percentage size.<\/p>\n

The change figures:<\/p>\n