September 2020 Comic Book Sales to Comics Shops

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

This data combines orders from all Direct Market distributors. Click to see only Diamond and DC's distributors.

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After the spring Coronavirus pandemic shutdown and DC's July departure for distributors Lunar Distribution and UCS Comic Distributors, Diamond returned to publishing monthly sales charts in August, but without indexed order numbers, monthly and annual comparative data, and market shares. In September, Diamond brought back market shares, a vital addition that makes some additional estimates possible.

Comichron's founder began reporting merged rankings and relative sales levels for Heroes World Distribution and Diamond in September 1996; the report below similarly brings together estimates for the various Direct Market distributors. Click to see the month's reports just for Diamond and just for DC's distributors.

OVERALL MARKET PROJECTIONS: Comichron projects that Diamond shipped approximately 5.6 million comic books, graphic novels, and magazines to its North American accounts in September 2020, and while it isn't possible to precisely parse out what portion are comics, historical performance of the individual publishers tells us that the comics portion would be over 5 million copies, but not much over. Comichron further projects that DC's distributors would have added at least 2 million more copies to that — around 1.85 million in initial orders for September comics and a portion more in reorders — bringing the number of comics sold to the Direct Market to somewhere between 7 million and 7.5 million copies. That compares with 5.92 million copies at Diamond in March 2020, when shutdowns were beginning and when DC was still part of its offerings, and 7.57 million copies in September 2019.

So there's a significant increase in unit sales volume over March — probably around 20%. Both DC's sales and Diamond's publishers' sales are up since that month, with DC's up relatively more thanks to having several hits in September. Comichron projects that the $6.99 Black Label title Batman: Three Jokers #2 was the top-ordered comic book industrywide in units, with the anniversary issue Detective Comics #1027, priced at $9.99 with many variants, the top dollar comic book. The expense of the latter issue helped propel the average comic retailers ordered from DC's distributors above the $5 mark for the first time since we began tracking the publisher separately.

That increase in volume since March is on significantly fewer releases. Across all publishers, there were 356 new comic books; that's a slate size that's almost 25% smaller than the 471 offered in March, when publishers were trying to get as much as possible out Diamond's doors pre-shutdown. It's also 20% smaller than the 443 new releases in September 2019.

On the dollar side, the Top 500 comics from both distributors combined appear to have topped $31 million at full retail, with at least $10 million of that coming from DC's first-month releases — no reorders included. The Top 500 comics in September 2019 sold for $32.3 million, so with DC's reorders in the mix we're likelylooking at fairly close year-to-year numbers. March 2020 only saw the Top 500 at Diamond worth $24.77 million, so September is well up from that.

We're unable to project graphic novels, and so unable to give a number for the whole industry. But we can say that periodical sales appear, from our calculations, to be keeping pace with last year's sales while doing so on many fewer new comics — and doing significantly better than March 2020's sales. The pandemic may have reduced output, but as of September 2020, it did not appear to have reduced overall demand.

Our chart fusing all publishers suggests that Venom #28, the top seller from Diamond, was in third overall, with Donny Cates' Thor #28 in fifth. X of Swords: Creation #1, Diamond's top dollar book, was fourth. Spawn #310 placed sixth, with James Tynion IV's Department of Truth #1 twelfth.

Batman continued to chart highly in advance of its 100th issue in October, with two issues making the Top 10. We detected what we believe is a significant falloff from the Batman and Death Metal titles to the rest of DC's offerings in September; Superman #25 placed ninth in our DC-only rankings, but was apparently in 39th for the industry overall.

MARKET SHARES: As noted above, Diamond did release market shares for its publishers; those can be seen on the left side of this page. We've chosen not to try to work DC into those statistics here, because we're missing data on DC's graphic novel sales and its reorders. It does appear, however, that on the unit sales side (which are mostly comics) Marvel had significantly more comics ordered than DC, not for the least reason that DC's slate, at 53 new issues, was much smaller than Marvel's slate, at 76 issues.

CHANGES TO THE CHARTS: Diamond released unit and dollar sales rankings for comic books and graphic novels as well as market shares, but did not publish overall market size data or order index numbers for its titles. A major reason why could be found in the charts that did appear: many comics were returnable and major discounting continued, complicating the underlying math going into market size calculations. Returnable comics, marked with asterisks in the chart below, represented a major chunk of the month's output. Each usually receives a pre-chart reduction of 10% in units, so already many entries are out of place compared with what really went to market.

In the absence of order index numbers, Comichron has supplemented the chart with its own projections, using a variety of resources to establish estimated sales levels.

For DC's distributors, we again drew upon a subset of known retail orders to project the relative order volumes of comic-book releases.

For Diamond, we drew upon that information as well, but added weight was given in September's report to other factors, including information from publishers, historical tracking, and the relationship between Diamond's unit and dollar sales rankings in cases where there did not appear to be discounting or returnability impacting the placements.

The newly returned market shares also helped, as they provide a cap on the number of units that Diamond could have shipped. In addition, several publishers whose shares Diamond published have little graphic novel activity (or none, yet, in the case of newcomer Artists Writers and Artisans, abbreviated AWA in the charts below). That fact puts ceilings on the number of units they could have sold, improving estimates in the lower reaches of the charts.

The result is the estimated-order ranges you see below, with DC figured in using our retail order subset to determine likely positioning. While the ranges differ from the exact figures we've been able to derive in recent years, they could well have been applied to any of our charts before 2003, when Diamond switched from reporting preorders to reporting final orders. They're presented below to underscore that some uncertainty remains.

Diamond's items appear in the order in which they did in Diamond's published charts, but the projections for each are Comichron's. For each issue, we've provided a range of what we believe are the lower and upper likely limits for an issue's North American shipments. The boundaries have been rounded to the nearest 5,000 for comics we think sold over 75,000 copies, the nearest 500 down to the 10,000-copy level, and 100 copies for items below 1,000 copies. Our best-guess estimates are actually somewhat below the midpoint for each range, with a more generous margin on the high side; our model finds it easier to predict a floor than a ceiling.

Further, we've added to the upper bounds of the ranges for all comics that are marked as returnable in Diamond's charts. That reflects the fact that the true number in circulation would indeed be higher than Diamond's rankings reflect.

Diamond and DC offered 17 comic books with cardstock variants at a different price; their sales have been fused by default below. You can find the component versions by going to the individual DC and Diamond pages for the month.

Things to remember: While the relative sales levels of titles we report below depend on information found in Diamond's rankings and market shares, we expect that the true order indexes would differ. Projected sales levels at the highest reaches of the chart are most prone to variation, because there's less data that would establish ceilings for those comics.

While we have our own projections for DC titles, the Diamond chart contains reorders and our DC chart does not, meaning that we're comparing apples to only certain kinds of apples. Batman: Three Jokers #1 would have had significant activity in September, but sales levels cannot be approximated using the method at hand.

It's also the case that the estimates here can be expected to differ from numbers that publishers themselves have on hand, including those that have been announced publicly. For example, Spawn #310, already mentioned above, was reported to have a print run of over 100,000 copies, not counting an 20,000-copy overship. But the Diamond charts have that 10% carve-out for returnable comics, for one thing, and they also report only on the comics shipped from its North American warehouses in the calendar month. Publisher sales to Europe can add a tenth or more to the orders for some titles, but the primary function of distributor reports is to inform retailers of regional supply levels, and most overseas copies never re-enter the North American market.

Rankings in these charts should also be expected to differ — often significantly — from the sales-to-consumers charts available at other outlets. Those report sell-through and not sell-in, and different retailers are sampled in each, with no known overlap in reporting stores as of the generation of the below charts. Both are worth knowing, of course, though sell-in tends to be of relatively greater importance in comics than it is in other publishing markets, given comics' nonreturnable nature and their status as a collectible. Orders by retailers represent the "first sale" and are a major determinant of publishing revenue.

You can see the reorders that were placed during the month on our pages for reorders and advance reorders for the year. We also have a page breaking out ship dates for second printings.

As is the case with all data on Comichron, it is subject to revision without notice in the event more authoritative and complete information about orders becomes available.

Click to skip to the Top Graphic Novels for the month. And you can see the reorders that were placed during the month on our pages for reorders and advance reorders for the year. We also have a page breaking out ship dates for second printings.

—John Jackson Miller

This list includes all new comic books released by DC's Direct Market Distributors and all comics in Diamond's Top 500 chart for the month. All variants are fused in these calculations.
The estimates for copies shipped are generated by Comichron, not the distributors, and are ranges based on information provided by publishers as well as other inputs described in the text above.
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.

September 2020 Graphic Novel Sales to Comics Shops

Diamond's graphic novel sales for the month can be found here. There is also a list of all DC graphic novels released through UCS on our DC page.