Analysts: August 2010 DM Estimates

The comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com offers their usual array of lists, estimates and analysis regarding the performance of comic books and graphic novels in the Direct Market of comic and hobby shops, this time for July 2010.

* Overview
* Analysis
* Top 300 Comic Books
* Top 300 Graphic Novels

John Jackson Miller at The Comics Chronicles has begun his analysis of the month here.

The big story is obvious: sales are significantly down in both graphic novels and comic books. Comics went down 17 percent and graphic novels down 21 percent. This is an August which should offer something to shops that do heavy summertime sales and to those that count on a returning college population. It is also on or near one-year anniversaries for Marvel and DC's dueling major announcements last year about ownership/management changes. It is also to the best of my knowledge more than a year away from the GN chart distortion caused by Watchmen. In other words, there are a lot of reasons to believe that this should have been a good month for the companies. If we were at the track, a lot of Daily Racing Forms would be crumpled and tossed to the ground.

The two questions that arise -- especially in the Doomapocalypticageddon mindset of today's distressed and discouraged comics industry -- are what happened and what does it mean? A reasonable guess as to what happened might center on the lack of a few right-now heavy-hitters from the major companies just by a confluence of circumstances, although the possibility that the market might be that dependent on the haphazard scheduling of the major mainstream companies to this extent may seem fairly alarming all by itself. You could also cite advance buying and scheduling to fit Comic-Con. A more upsetting notion may be that the growing presence of the $3.99 comic book has altered buying habits in a variety of ways, such as people shifting to other buying strategies or abandoning the hobby altogether. Some might cite a potential exhaustion with certain kinds of comic books, comic books that have the greatest ease of access to the market place and the attention of the most fans. We also may be in a dead period between summer convention season and holiday shopping season (October-December).

The range of ideas as to how bad things might get run the gamut as well. I've had two prominent comics publishing veterans write me in the last week to give ETAs on traditional comics' collapse (2013 and 2014; put your money down). And yet there are people like John Jackson Miller in the link above, or the writer Stuart Moore in various comments threads, that think this is just another round of bad times in comics' ever-continuing cycle of them. The one thing I would point out is that the numbers are such in comics that a significant rally could be had without heaven and earth having to be moved. A modest boost for any other art form would be considered great times for comics. If Marvel, say, were to find the right way to do a line-wide event around Spider-Man rather than some of the other characters they used to anchor such series, that might be just the thing that's needed to make this particular, fussy, compacted market configuration work, even if it's then equally alarming that many of the structural problems would remain in the medium- to long-term.

As far as individual books that jumped out at me, it's nice that comics shops did well by the Scott Pilgrim series, and it's always good to see one of those classy Jeff Smith Scholastic book slip into single-digit rankings on a sales chart.
 
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