April 2015 Comic Book Sales to Comics Shops

Estimated Comics Shipped to North American Comics Shops
Based on Reports from Diamond Comic Distributors

Covers and issue links on this page lead to current eBay listings. This site may be compensated if you make a purchase.

Recent-era records fell all over the place in the comic shop market in April 2015. Retailers ordered 8.39 million copies of the Top 300 comic books in the month, beating any figure since December 1997, when the figure was 8.99 million copies preordered. (That was the month that Darkness #11 had eleven covers.) Notably, eleven comic books had orders of more than 100,000 copies; that didn't even happen during the DC relaunch in 2011. The last month with 12 titles above 100,000 copies was July 2007.

Retailers ordered $33.72 million worth of the Top 300 comics, beating by nearly $2 million a record set the previous October. That was due to the unit sales mentioned above, and also the fact that the average comic book in the Diamond Top 300 cost $3.82, eclipsing the old record by four cents. The average Top 300 comic book retailers ordered (the weighted price) was $4.02, another record. Both were impacted by what was actually the top dollar volume comic book in the industry, Marvel's Deadpool #45. Celebrating 250 issues of the title in its various incarnations, the $9.99 book had unit sales of just under 100,000 copies, and thus total retail dollar volume of just under $1 million.

In total, comics, graphic novels, and magazines combined had orders of $56.72 million in April, another Diamond Exclusive Era record. That brought the year at close to $185 million, nearly $20 more than the first four months of 2014.

Read more in our preliminary and final analysis posts for the month. You can also click to skip to the Top Graphic Novels for the month.

—John Jackson Miller

This list includes all items on Diamond's Top 300 chart plus any post-#300 items from its Top Independent and Small Publisher charts.
If you don't see a book, Diamond released no data for it.
Items marked with asterisks [*] had their reported orders reduced by 10% due to returnability.
Click to read the methodology for this table's estimates.
Distributor charts are regional commodity reports, not measures of a work's total reach. Read our FAQ.
Title links below lead to current listings for the issues on eBay. As an eBay Partner, this site may be compensated if you make a purchase.

April 2015 Graphic Novel Sales to Comics Shops

Estimated Graphic Novels and Trade Paperbacks Shipped to North American Comics Shops Based on Reports from Diamond Comic Distributors

This list includes all items on Diamond's Top 300 Graphic Novel charts, plus any post-#300 items from its Top Independent and Manga charts. If you don't see a book, Diamond released no data for it.

The links lead to title details on Amazon (paid links). You can also find the books at your comics shop.

The Top 300 graphic novels, aided by a new Walking Dead volume, topped $9 million for the first time—or second, depending on how you're counting. December 2013 was an aberration in the charts with a huge number of graphic novels sent to market at deep discounts, meaning more than $10 million in volume at full retail was purchased; but the figure was much inflated. April's performance appears to be built more on books that were offered at something closer to their usual discounts.