ICv2.com: July 2007 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 2007.

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

I'm not sure what the fact that a re-launch of Thor is the #1 comic book in all of comic shop land for the month of July actually means. While the character was gone for a reasonably long period in comics time and therefore ready for a re-launch, and the creative team is well-liked by enough people I guess, and Marvel's having a great year overall, the Thunder God's long and established history as at best a moderately popular character should make folks wonder if it's the "re-launch" part more than the "Thor" part that's at work here. Also, the company used a multiple covers stunt with the issue, which employed sparingly can still goose sales. With that in mind, I'd suspect this really shows how much the big companies can shape certain events. Sustaining them, on the other hand, usually proves more problematic, even with the DM's tendency to have numbers conservatively hold their shape.

One of the people much more practiced at looking at such estimates, Marc-Oliver Frisch, examined my dour reading of DC's position on these charts last month and proceeded to cuff me around the room a bit, justifiably so, noting that certain solid performers for the company failed to be released in June, so July wasn't going to see the bottom drop out. A surface glance indicates Marc-Oliver was right and I was wrong, as DC's presence at the top of the charts seems roughly the same: two titles in the top 10, eight in the top 25, and a couple of solid performers right below that blinking in. However, DC's weekly series Countdown is still losing readers, close to a tenth of its sales from the beginning of June to the end of July, and this is a month that includes a Flash title that I believe launched with incentives and the rare for DC convergence of both of their intermittently published All-Star comics coming out on the same calendar page. I'll be interested in seeing how the number crunching actually pans out, but even though they're hanging in there I can't imagine there's a lot of high-fives being exchanged at 1700 Broadway.

As always, as long as we're hearing about discrepancies between these numbers and what creators are reporting, it's best to take these lists not just as estimates, but as estimates of the broader trends only.
 
posted 3:10 am PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
 
Full Archives