Analysts: May 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 May 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.

I'm not sure you can spin May's results into good news without several leaps of faith or some real narrowcasting in terms of what "good news" means. Sales were down for the Top 300 and no title sold over 100,000. This might not automatically be a worry except that the market is mostly designed to deliver top 20 hits and a stronger Top 300 than total market strength. The difficulty for retailers to profit with a wide array of titles as opposed to a wide variety of titles buttressed by a dozen or so hits increases exponentially in a non-returnable system because of the reduced margin of error in ordering. A lack of titles driving things at the top end can also indicate a weakness in the market in that only a certain hardcore audience is being served. With two line-wide events now begun -- DC's effort not even cresting 90,000 on these charts -- this month seeing depressed numbers means a lot more than a lost January or February, or some months after events fall off. The graphic novel chart is worse on second glance, with the top title going to an expanded comic, basically, as opposed to a $14.95 or $29.95 book that might be a better profit center.

There are book selling more copies further down the line, but I don't think I've read an analysis that qualifies what that means in people-shopping-in-stores terms. (John Jackson Miller would be the most likely person to write such an article; I just haven't seen it.) You can also make the case that the serial comics middle class -- those books selling over 50,000 -- is larger than it was 10 years ago when sales were pretty crappy, but I'm not sure what to make of that, either, except maybe to suggest there are some solid publishing initiatives out there and the failure may be in infrastructure. I'm just not certain of anything right now.

Between the shakiness of the earliest part of the year, Marvel doubling up titles this summer, the overall crappy numbers and DC setting off a paradigm-shift bomb in September, this is going to be one weird year, and potentially a lost one.

Brian Wood and company's latest DMZ collection struck me as a solid creator-driven performer in the midst of a lot of books -- not all of them! -- that looked much more corporate
 
posted 9:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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