The Comichron: The Blog of The Comics Chronicles

I see that the American Comic Book Industry is doi...

2012-05-15T17:57:05.130-05:00

I see that the American Comic Book Industry is doing well now, and hopefully increases. But I have always wondered how it is doing in the rest of the world. I know that Japan keeps track with the money they make off of their comics, and so do the French and Belgian, but it seems that we're the only ones that do not keep track of how much we make with our comic book in the rest of the world. Is there any website that has this information? I'm just curious on how we're doing compared to the rest of the world especially with other comic book giants such as the Japanese Manga and the Franco-Belgium comics.. are we ahead in readership, or behind, tied? Always wondered about that.

The NEW 52 did what It was make to do, Boost the s...

2012-05-07T11:05:08.966-05:00

The NEW 52 did what It was make to do, Boost the sales in an uncanny way never seen in many years.

Its failure to get new young readers was to be expected.

Thats what happens when you have no patience and rush for It.

The winer was Didio as he left his position whit a succes and for the next guy to clean up the mess.

An expectacular political tactic.

DC is the big loser cause their unit and dollar sh...

2012-05-05T07:27:56.709-05:00

DC is the big loser cause their unit and dollar share drops month after month while Marvel and Image rise. DC has been actually selling LESS books the past few months as opposed to what they were selling the summer months right before the reboot. The New 52 is a big fiasco, they alieanated the old fans with the silly change for a short term spike in sales and new readers that never came. You deserve the failure DC and it will only get worse!

It's good to see that Comics are making a stro...

2012-05-05T01:43:58.481-05:00

It's good to see that Comics are making a strong come back. I have a few friends who read comics, but it will be awesome to see the same circulation figures that this great nation once had during the Silver Age.

Oops, yeah you already have 1969. I read the colum...

2012-05-02T22:36:11.639-05:00

Oops, yeah you already have 1969. I read the columns wrong. Oh well :)

John, Great article. I went to the Avengers spotl...

2012-05-02T22:20:36.929-05:00

John,

Great article. I went to the Avengers spotlight page and noticed you didn't have the data from 1969. I happen to have a scan of the Statement of Ownership from Avengers #86.

http://i.imgur.com/cWk7t.jpg

Well imagine if the market was that strong today? ...

2012-04-12T23:00:08.610-05:00

Well imagine if the market was that strong today? Then that would mean that it would be over 6x what it makes today, which would make it a multi-billion dollar industry. Kinda sucks to see that Comics fare better over seas then they do here on US soil today. (US brand comics sell 300,000 - 500,000 an issue in Europe compared to 20,000 - 200,000 here in the US and Canada).

There is no unified source for information on digi...

2012-04-10T10:00:58.389-05:00

There is no unified source for information on digital downloads that provides transparent, trackable information with exact dollars and numbers of downloads. As has been mentioned a few times here on the site, that impedes any kind of aggregated tracking.

It has been generally believed that the sum derived from paid downloads is still very small -- dental floss as compared to a sheet of paper, to use one publisher's analogy. That may not continue to be true, but it still has a long way to go to reach the scale of some of the other contributors to the business:

http://blog.comichron.com/2012/02/big-picture-bookscan-comics-shops-and.html

The mission of The Comics Chronicles is in large part a print mission, supplying collectors with information about how many physical copies existed of individual comic books. It's why there's no attempt to follow, monthly, the sales of trade paperbacks through bookstores, which as the link above shows, add far more to the reach of comics than digital does yet.

The "reach" of the comics stories themselves is worthwhile information -- but in some sense, it's just another stage in the tracking of "pass-along" readership, which publishers of print copies have been guessing at for decades. Publishers would tell advertisers that each comic book was read by four or five people -- it was always a total guess -- and the information was significant for advertisers, but less so for the bottom line. Similarly, any discussion about digital "reach" would have to bring in the doubtlessly large grouping that unauthorized downloads contribute, and, as with pass-along, we'd be mostly guessing about that.

I'm more interested in hard numbers here, so I guess the upshot is that digital has some way to go before it can be tracked. And then, it'd need to be discussed separately, just as we parse comic books and trade paperbacks, before being aggregated.

I'm curious, this is all physical print. How m...

2012-04-10T05:22:26.174-05:00

I'm curious, this is all physical print. How much did they sell with digital sales included? I remember with the I-Pad and Nooks all the electronics, the top selling apps were those from DC and other comic book publishers, and it remained in the top spot for like several weeks last year. So I'm thinking if all those people are now getting comics that way, shouldn't you start include those on here? I mean it would give a more accurate circulation for each comic and graphic novel. Just a thought.

sources: http://gigaom.com/apple/success-of-comics-on-the-ipad-good-for-comics-elsewhere-too/

http://gigaom.com/apple/now-that-publishers-get-it-comics-and-the-ipad-are-a-perfect-pair/

Diamond releases comparative change numbers every ...

2012-04-08T15:15:59.057-05:00

Diamond releases comparative change numbers every month -- which you see in the grid above -- in the first wave of the data release. So while we can't see exact sales figures yet, we do know that in aggregate how they will compare to last month and last year.

I'm curious, how can you tell the sales and un...

2012-04-08T12:25:30.366-05:00

I'm curious, how can you tell the sales and unit figures from March of this year if you don't have all of the sales yet? That's what is kind of confusing because the sales figure index of X-Men vs Avengers is pretty high, and there's at least 5 different titles that sold over 100k which is a lot better compared to last years. So that's why I'm wondering why at all would it go down period?

Yep, that would seem to settle it. From the last p...

2012-04-05T16:22:56.993-05:00

Yep, that would seem to settle it. From the last page of his redirect:

http://www.comicartville.com/brunsliebowitzpg15.jpg

So the issue was still one of 200,000 -- 202,000, specifically -- with sales of 130,000, with drawns on #2 at 211,000 and sales of 136,000. That suggests that while it was a steeper climb to reach the January 1939 numbers, it was already on its way.

In Detective Comics Inc v Bruns (the Wonder Man la...

2012-04-05T16:02:44.901-05:00

In Detective Comics Inc v Bruns (the Wonder Man lawsuit in 1939), Jack Liebowitz confirmed on the stand that Action 1 sold 130,000 copies from a print run of 202,000

The only overseas sales for U.S. comics that I loo...

2012-04-01T15:52:43.453-05:00

The only overseas sales for U.S. comics that I look at are the sales of the actual U.S. books overseas -- that is, not reconfigured in packages for the different markets. Diamond sells about 10% again of its U.S. sales in U.S. comics to the U.K. market; that's about all I know.

This site has information on sales of British comics: http://www.downthetubes.net/writing_comics/comics_facts_and_figures.html

I know you have sales figures from domestic sales....

2012-04-01T12:38:13.261-05:00

I know you have sales figures from domestic sales.. and I found a lot of it interesting. But I'm curious, do you have foreign sales, like how different American titles do in places like the UK, Europe, Russia, Asia, Australia; or places like Mexico and Brazil and other Central and South American countries where comics are very popular?

We haven't had five over 200,000 in many years...

2012-03-16T21:33:27.234-05:00

We haven't had five over 200,000 in many years, but we did have close to those numbers in the first month of the DC relaunch, so it is possible (though 10k for 300th place would be unprecedented).

But what really has to happen to guarantee that that the number of ordering stores needs to increase. Then there'd be enough bandwidth, so to speak, to hit those numbers again more regularly.

I see comics are getting healthy again. Do you fo...

2012-03-16T21:25:37.214-05:00

I see comics are getting healthy again. Do you foresee in the near future the top 5 sellers selling over 200,000 and another 10 around the 100,000s, and the 300th place selling more than 10,000?

I haven't really looked at any one publisher&#...

2012-03-16T09:28:27.726-05:00

I haven't really looked at any one publisher's titles too closely, but declines after the first issue is the natural pattern for American comics, probably occurring more than 90% of the time. This has been the case for decades. First issues often had an additional after-market value, and many people sample the first issue and then wait for the trade.

But the bigger reason is that since retailers order comics in advance, when they order second and third issues they usually don't have full information about how #1 sold, so they are more conservative. There are occasions where it goes up -- like Civil War or Jim Lee's Batman run -- but it usually requires there being a lot of extra copies printed of the second and third issues to meet the reorder demand.

Hey I'm curious, I noticed a pattern that afte...

2012-03-16T08:46:11.834-05:00

Hey I'm curious, I noticed a pattern that after issue 1 on any comic, the sales go down and rarely go back up to what the first issue sold. With the DC's NEW 52, is there an increase in readership, or is it the same old fan base collecting the new material? See I wanna know if American comics are expanding like the Japanese are, or if it's shrinking with the very hardcore still reading.
Thanks.

About the only way to estimate them, barring inter...

2012-02-16T15:27:17.961-06:00

About the only way to estimate them, barring internal information, would be to take royalty statements and work backwards. But, yeah, that adds to the fudge factor!

It's hard to really know the answer to this, b...

2012-02-15T14:56:52.843-06:00

It's hard to really know the answer to this, because the universe of book sales can be drawn a lot of different ways, and Nielsen might or might not consider the non-returnable sales that publishers do to comics shops to be part of that universe.

My hunch is they look at Diamond's sales to comics shops as essentially identical to other direct sales that publishers make (like to libraries, or book clubs) and thus not part of the group they are tracking. Diamond's $150 million annually in graphic novel sales to comics shops is big, but I don't know how big it is in relation to the overall universe of all books. If this source is correct...

http://www.ibisworld.com/industry/default.aspx?indid=1233

...and it is a $27 billion industry, the lack of Diamond data would mean less than 1% is missing from Bookscan overall.

A recent post on this topic is here, you may have seen it already:
http://blog.comichron.com/2012/02/big-picture-bookscan-comics-shops-and.html

This was an intersting article but a bit confusing...

2012-02-15T14:28:18.687-06:00

This was an intersting article but a bit confusing for a neophyte trying figure out the extent of the Graphic Novel Market. So you tell me if my assumptions are correct. Based upon this article the figures quoted for Diamond Comic Distributors would be part of Nielsen's 25% of US sales apart from the 75% they attribute to others. That's the first assumptiomn. Assumption 2 is that amonst the remaining 25% are Walmart the other retailers who are not including their stats with Amazon, correct?

With the advent of Ebay, it was noted be me in Aus...

2012-02-15T01:08:40.796-06:00

With the advent of Ebay, it was noted be me in Australia that the cost of the Scrooge comics dropped. A lot of titles were binned but for some reason, (LOL), Scrooge was kept, Carl Barks is the clue, and when the comics appeared those of us who dreamed of number ones and first appearances did not have to pay the gross debt of Greece to get them. Supply and demand.

I was a 10-year old kid in 1960, and I well rememb...

2012-02-13T12:27:01.993-06:00

I was a 10-year old kid in 1960, and I well remember when Gold Key first appeared. They just didn't feel as good as Dells, and (at least in my mind) the quality of art and story dropped at the same time. If a half-million otherboomers felt the same way (not inconceivable), there's your answer.

Also add scholastic orders into schools and such, ...

2012-02-11T01:56:16.486-06:00

Also add scholastic orders into schools and such, that aren't what I'd leave in the "fudge" for mass market sales.

And library sales.

I don't have any real way to estimate those numbers, but both could be very very large numbers.

-B