February 2017 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.

February 2017 was another month in which a lot of comic books were shipped to the Direct Market at relatively little cost to retailers, although for a different reason than in January. That month, Marvel’s 10% minimum overship resulted in the largest number of comic books sent to market in any January since 1997. In February 2017, it was Image’s 25th anniversary — and its promotionally priced comic books — that caused the largest number of new comic books to be shipped than in any February since 1997.

More than 7.85 million comic books were shipped by Diamond to retailers in North America, and more than 750,000 of them were copies of Walking Dead #163, which retailers ordered at its 25-cent cost. Special no-cover-price variants were also offered for retailers who ordered 250 copies or more, and again for 500 copies or more.

Diamond does not include comics cover-priced under a dollar in its Top Sellers lists, a move made after Batman: The Ten-Cent Adventure, a nine-cent issue of Fantastic Four and a 13-cent Gen13 topped the charts in 2002, along with all the original Free Comic Book Day issues. (We removed those issues to the tops of their respective months, with asterisks rather than rankings, in the Comichron charts.) So while Diamond acknowledged the performance of the Walking Dead issue in its press release, it ranked Marvel's Star Wars: Darth Maul #1 as the top-seller for February.

The 25-cent Image copies resulted in a lopsided market share reading for the company; its unit share was 18.13%, as compared with a 9.58% dollar share. The 9.58% dollar share was Image’s best since January 2016, so while it’s on the high end, it had hit loftier marks relatively recently. We see the absence of the Walking Dead issues from the charts when we add up the sales of the Top 300 comics. 6.33 million copies of the Top 300 comics were sold, but 7.85 million copies were sold overall. That's a larger than usual gap unaccounted for, and includes the Walking Deads.

Retailers ordered $39.77 million in comics, graphic novels, and magazines across February’s four shipping weeks; that’s the first time the overall total has been below $40 million since February 2014. Comics dollar sales were off 4.47% and graphic novels off 3.3%, resulting in a year-over-year decline of 4.11%.

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.

February 2017 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.

On the graphic novel side of things, unit sales of graphic novels were down quite a bit against a February last year that had both a new Wicked & Divine and a new Lumberjanes volume. Seven to Eternity Vol. 1 led the chart.