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January 22, 2008


ICv2.com: December ‘07 DM Estimates

imageThe 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 December 2007 and also the entire year 2007.

* Overview
* Analysis
* Top 300 Comic Books
* Top 100 Graphic Novels

Their big news is that the Direct Market of comics and hobby shops was up in combined graphic novel/comic book sales nine percent from the year 2006, mostly due to big gains in the first half of the year. This was due to a seven percent increase in comic sales and an 18 percent increase in graphic novels. The gains weren't as significant as those experience in 2006.

As far as the monthly news, the DM seems to have rebounded from a decline in November to show a three percent bump in comics sales and an 11 percent gain in graphic novels, the latter of which sort of make sense given the Christmas gift-giving season, although maybe there's no relationship there at all.

Nothing much occurs to me looking at the various lists, which admittedly are sales estimates and not sales figures. At least nothing new occurs to me. I'm sure a lot of people will note that the two top comic books, Ultimates Vol. 3 #1 (a new volume in a popular series featuring brand new creators) and Amazing Spider-Man #545 (Spider-Man and his wife make a deal with the devil to return the character to its classic status quo), were unpopular with a lot of fans, the latter for its controversial plot elements and the former for sucking. That tends to put a sour spin on the general fan mood, and may have consequences for how sales match orders for subsequent books in those series.

What else? The DC weekly series Countdown doesn't seem to have found a bottom in terms of its slow sales bleed even as it begins to wind down. This puts DC in a weird place of on the one hand enjoying an extra 300,000 comics sold in a month and people still seeing it as something of a failure when compared to the last weekly project. It's probably worth noting that some of the X-Men titles are creeping back up to the top of the charts based on the lean and serviceable "Messiah Complex" crossover. Chris Ware's latest ACME Novelty Library sold about 3350 copies through the DM at $18 a pop, and the last wave of Naruto Nation (whereby multiple volumes of the Naruto series were released this Fall) had a presence at the top of the charts. There also seems to be growth at the bottom of the comic sales chart, a slight shift of 20 or so place for equivalent sales, which is a phenomenon I don't know that I've seen convincing analysis on, but I would imagine has to be encouraging.
 
posted 6:30 am PST | Permalink
 

 
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