Top Comic Books of Decade: The 2010s

Estimated Sales of Comic Books 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.

The first issue of Marvel's relaunched Star Wars series was the comic book ordered most by comics shops in North America in the decade of the 2010s. The issue's sales include several hundred thousand copies purchased by the repackager Loot Crate, but its sales even without those are enough to make it the top title of the decade. Close to 100 different variant covers exist of the issue. Detective Comics #1000 moved into second place in 2019, one of two late-decade anniversary issues in the Top Five.

Comichron looked back at every month of comic-book orders reported by Diamond Comic Distributors, the exclusive retail agent for the largest publishers in the industry. The tables report Diamond's Top 300 comics from each month, as well as the number of copies ordered by its approximately 3,000 retail accounts.

For the years 2010-2015 and 2017-18, the sales include all issues shipped by Diamond in the calendar year. 2016 is like the years of the decade of the 2000s, where the chart only includes data from the monthly Top 300 lists. Actual 2016 figures will be slightly higher in most cases than the figure that appears here.

The decade's bestsellers break down by year as follows:

2010: 8
2011: 23
2012: 40
2013: 27
2014: 15
2015: 55
2016: 44
2017: 24
2018: 32
2019: 33

These figures are for the comic book direct market only — the network of comic book stores that sell the lion's share of comic books in periodical form in North America. Sales of these comics on newsstands or by subscription are not included.

Copies of titles repackaged by the bundling service Loot Crate are included only if Diamond distributed them to Loot Crate. In fairness, these copies did not move through comics shops and should likely be excised from competitive measures involving them, but we don't know specific numbers that went to the service.

Diamond compiled its own more accurate, less detailed list here, which differs in a few entries because the charts below compile ten end-of-year Diamond tables, a method which shortchanges comics that came out near the end of the year. So Star Wars: Vader Down #1, a November book, is 12th below but 10th on the Diamond list due to copies that shipped early the next year. Diamond also released a decade list for graphic novels: Walking Dead Vol. 1 led it.

More after the charts:

† Items marked with a dagger include between 200-400,000 copies sold by the repackager Loot Crate.
* Items with asterisks were returnable issues whose final orders may be higher or lower.
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.

Items on the table are listed in the months in which they first made the Diamond chart — following the links to the individual months' pages shows what those comics sold initially, since later reorders pop up in the months that follow.

And as this is a periodical ranking, it doesn't get into bound collected editions and graphic novels, or digital sales.

—John Jackson Miller

Want to see how earlier issues fit into the list?
Click to see the Top Selling Comics of the 21st Century.