October 2020 Comics Sales to Comics Shops

Projections for Comics Ordered by North American Comics Shops
from Diamond Comic Distributors and DC's Distributors

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

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

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, which made some additional estimates possible.

Comichron's founder began reporting merged rankings and relative sales levels for Heroes World Distribution and Diamond in October 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 5.5 million comic books, graphic novels, and magazines to its North American accounts in October 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 — bringing the number of comics sold to the Direct Market to somewhere over 7 million. 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.

It is off from the 8.82 million copies in October 2019 — but that month was the fourth best of its decade saleswise, benefiting from one more shipping week and a bloated release schedule. October 2020's performance was based on only 373 new comics, versus 521 releases then.

Comichron projects that the $6.99 Black Label title Batman: Three Jokers #3 was the top-ordered comic book industrywide in units, with the anniversary issue Amazing Spider-Man #49, the 850th issue by Marvel's legacy numbering (explained in more detail here) as the top dollar comic book. This marks the first time since DC left Diamond that the #1 comic books at the two have split the top honors in units and dollars.

On the dollar side, the Top 500 comics from both distributors combined appear to have topped $31 million at full retail, with nearly $10 million of that coming from DC's first-month releases — no reorders included. The Top 500 comics in October 2019 sold for $38.72 million, but again that month had 148 more comic book releases. March 2020 only saw the Top 500 at Diamond worth $24.77 million, so October 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 October 2020, it did not appear to have reduced overall demand.

The month's combined top five benefited from anniversary issues. Batman #100 took second overall, followed Amazing Spider-Man #49. Donny Cates' Venom #29, the #2 seller at Diamond, placed fourth, while DC's third-place book, Dark Nights Death Metal #4, took fifth.

Todd McFarlane's Spawn #311 placed sixth. IDW's $8.99 TMNT: The Last Ronin #1 ranked 30th in units but would have been much higher in dollars. Die!Namite #1 added to the growing list of "die"-named titles, ranking 37th as Dynamite's top finisher. Boom's top-ranked title was Something Is Killing the Children #11, in 43rd.

All four of the aforementioned titles are returnable, meaning their true number of copies that entered circulation is higher than the rankings below may reflect; 111 comics were marked as returnable in the Top 500.

October market shares found Marvel leading Image around 5-to-1 in dollars; that's a smaller gap than existed between the publishers in both September 2020 and October 2019.

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.

Just within the top comics below, Marvel leads DC in units about 41% to 30%, but again reorders aren't included for DC — and, of course, DC's slate at 49 issues was much smaller than Marvel's, at 77. Comichron projects that IDW, Boom, and Random House all saw increases in dollar sales over October 2019, even with one less shipping week in the mix.

UNDERSTANDING THE CHARTS: Whereas DC's distributors released no usable information at all, 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 111 entries out of the Top 500, a major chunk of the month's output. Each usually receives a pre-chart reduction made by Diamond 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 October'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 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.

For this month, our best-guess estimates on all nonreturnable comics are at the midpoint for each range. Meanwhile, 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 of copies in circulation are initially higher than Diamond's rankings reflect.

Finally, in a change from September, we've narrowed the ranges reported from Diamond's comics, while increasing the ranges for DC's. This reflects the greater confidence we have in the Diamond table, which draws upon a larger array of evidence.

Diamond and DC offered 18 comic books with cardstock or other variants at a different price; their sales have been fused by default below. You can find the component versions by going to the bottom of the charts, or by visiting 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 October, 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. 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.

Read more in our preliminary post. You can also 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.

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.

—John Jackson Miller (Latest revision: Dec. 14, 2020)

This list includes all items on Diamond's Top 500 charts, plus any post-#500 items from its Top Independent 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.

October 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.