Diamond year-end rankings now being added

by John Jackson Miller and T.M. Haley

With Diamond Comic Distributors soon to announce its 2009 year-end sellers and market shares, The Comics Chronicles is also beginning to post some of Diamond's year-end tables from previous years, beginning with 2007. More years will be soon to follow. Some years have a full 300 entries; earlier ones have fewer. But all show something we can't see just from looking at the monthly comics reports, because the year-end tallies include all reorders that individual comics and trade paperbacks garnered throughout the year.

2007, as the link shows, was the year that featured the end of Civil War, the death of Captain America, and World War Hulk. Thanks largely to these titles, Marvel took the #1 spot on Diamond's Top 300 all twelve months of the year. These sales contributed to the year's 9% increase in overall sales over 2006.

Since Diamond does not provide indexed figures with its year-end reports, these tables are simply rankings without estimates. The end-of-decade page does feature aggregated unit sales estimates for several of the highest-ranking issues, but, again, since not all months of reorders appear in Diamond's Top 300, those figures are slightly lower than the actual numbers of copies shipped.

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