October 19, 2011
Missed It: Analysts’ September 2011 DM 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 September 2011. I totally missed them when they came out.
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Overview
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Analysis
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Top 300 Comic Books
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Top 300 Graphic Novels
My favorite numbers cruncher John Jackson Miller at
The Comics Chronicles has begun his analysis of the month
here.
It's going to be a tough month to figure out. Many although not all of DC's comic books -- the dominant sales entry this month and certainly the comics to which many people are going to lists like these to see after how they did -- were sold in returnable fashion. This means that there's a built-in adjustment for those figures that may or may not change as they're shipped back to the publisher. The good thing about the way people like Mr. Griepp and Mr. Miller do what they do is that they're pretty damn used to working with estimates because of the reluctance of publishers to release real figures. So it's sort of like eating in a restaurant with two cooks that are used to measuring things out in their hands and by the width of their fingers rather than in measuring cups and spoons that now have to do it solely by sight for a while. In other words, I'm pretty confident in the general ballparking of these figure for analyses like these, but you definitely need to make allowance for
really firm statements about
specific titles, the next few months more than ever. (I think DC plans on employing returnable comics through late Spring of 2012.)
I think the conventional wisdom for these figures will be that this represents a significant improvement over the last nine to twelve months of serial comics sales figure, but a) the fact that DC scored only a modest victory over Marvel in terms of market share shows how weak their position had become vis-a-vis their main competitor (don't let anyone tell you this isn't important to those companies), and b) the gains overall really kind of underline just how terribly sick the market had become in recent, measurable period. It's sort of like we're all brave enough now to go back and look at how quickly in the ranks comic books fell under the 40K and 30K and 20K figures because things are in slight relief. There's a lot of work left to do, and the potential structural weakness in the overall system -- appealing, long-term content
and the ability of stores to move it in major numbers after years of being cuffed about the head and body -- in terms of supporting a sustained surge now gets called into question. There are also some indications that the sales of these comics drew from the sales of other comics down the long tail, which calls into questions how many new customers were involved.
There a couple of graphic novel things worth noting. Frank Miller enjoys strong if not wholly remarkable support in Direct Market shops, while the second go-round on
Sailor Moon GNs is once again almost solely focused on bookstore sales.
posted 6:10 am PST |
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