ICv2.com: January ‘08 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 January, 2008. Because of a glitch in the figures provided by Diamond, these numbers have been re-run, so I'm presenting them here today as if they were brand new and tweaking my commentary where applicable.

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

Their big news is that sales of both comics and graphic novels to shops were up slightly from the same month in 2007, and that this was due to strength across the board rather than from a single title. The big news as compared to the falsely-compiled charts is that the sales boost is not as significant as initially reported.

I'm not sure that a whole lot beyond this modest gain jumps out at me. Posting any sort of gains in January seems to me a good thing given that winter isn't traditionally, at least anecdotally, a big period for direct market retailers. The only odd things I noticed taking a look at the trades list were 1) Watchmen in the top 50, 2) only one manga publisher with a book in the top 50, which I swear wasn't the case in some previous months, 3) Dark Horse actually has more top 25 trades than DC does. If you're looking for that surprise spike performance, Dynamite's $1 Project Superpowers kick-off hits the comic-book charts in impressive fashion.

An entire top 10 over 100,000 units moved is also probably worth noting, as is Marvel taking nine of those 10 slots and DC taking zero. Some of Marvel's stunts seems like they could one-timers -- the last Joss Whedon-written regular-series Astonishing X-Men for one, although even that's being re-launched in a way that may allow it to keep its sales momentum. Other Marvel titles look like they still have some room to bleed off numbers before dropping, even the toxic Ultimates Vol. 3, and only one of DC's titles, the declining Justice League of America, is in sniffing distance of that top 10. If someone were to write one of those "Marvel hitting on all cylinders" articles right now, at least in terms of comic book sales it'd be hard to argue with them, even if the market itself performed less capably than initially imagined.
 
posted 9:05 am PST | Permalink
 

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