Analysts: April 2011 Direct Market Estimates

The comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com has offered up 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 April 2011.

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

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

One thing we see this month is that despite the reduction of top-end numbers in previous 2011 charts, that isn't necessarily reflective of some sort of structural issue: the first issue of of the Marvel event series Fear Itself sold almost 130K into the market (and will surely pass that number on selective reorders), while the latest volume of the solid performer Fables trade series had over 11,000 copies sprinkled throughout the direct market.

Beyond that, you can almost take your choice as to what to analyze and how to analyze it. The numbers up top generally continue to impress no one. If you compare the numbers this month to the numbers five years ago, you find that in 2006 there were only 32 comic above the 50,000 sales mark as opposed to the 28 that hit that level now. But where the comics rest above that point has changed radically. Only four serial comic books sold over 70K last month. In 2006 five comics sold over 110,000 copies.

That may not be as bad as it sounds. The month to month figures suggest a bit of staunching in terms of recent trends favoring decline. John Jackson Miller assures us that the comics down the charts from this more elite class are selling 100, 200, 400 percent more than they did in previous years, and that this has a impact across the market. It's still super-uneasy for me to conceive of a DM where the top books have taken such a big hit in sales. This is primarily a hunch of mine, in that the market seems to me to have been set up to deliver best-selling superhero books, and any inability to do just that is a bit scarier for that perceived emphasis. I'm also not sure that the market as currently constituted isn't calcified to the point it resists change. For example, one ameliorative circumstance of the last big stale period for serial superhero comic books is that you saw some very real attention paid to reliable and well-executed serial books like Bone and Sandman. Most of those books have been chased from the market outright, and those that remained seem to hit a glass ceiling really, really quickly. (There are a few exceptions.) I wonder at the long-term effect of a Direct Market that maintains this exact shape.
 
posted 8:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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