The bestselling comics in comic stores were an extraordinarily weak bunch in February, with the top title, X-Force #1 (featuring 2 covers), selling only around 105,000 copies. Only three titles, X-Force, New Avengers, and one of the Amazing Spider-Man issues, topped 100,000 copies, something that happened only once all last year, in October. Prior to October 2007, it had been over 18 months, in January of 2006, since as few as three titles were over 100,000 copies in sales to comic stores.
Declines in the top 25 titles heavily outnumbered increases; only four titles increased versus the previous issues, versus 20 decliners.
As it did last month, Marvel had a strong hold on the top spots, with nine of the top ten comic titles.
Dynamite Entertainment's second The Boys collection topped graphic novel sales in February, with sales similar to the sales of the first volume last May. That first volume has continued to turn up in the top 100 graphic novel lists in the months since than, clearly continuing to sell at relatively strong levels.
Six different publishers had titles in the top ten graphic novels in comic stores in February, an unusually diverse group.
Here are ICv2's estimates of the sales by Diamond Comic Distributors to comic stores on the top 25 comic titles in February:
105,149 X-Force #1
104,140 New Avengers #38
101,112 Amazing Spider-Man #549
98,315 Thor #6
97,210 Ultimates 3 #3
93,766 All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder #9
93,725 Hulk #2
92,654 Fantastic Four #554
90,874 Amazing Spider-Man #550
90,410 Uncanny X-Men #495
89,803 Justice League #18
88,132 X-Men Legacy #208
88,084 Amazing Spider-Man #551
88,070 Buffy Vampire Slayer #11
86,038 Captain America #35
84,132 Justice Society #12
83,466 Mighty Avengers #9
82,702 Justice Society #13
68,249 Countdown #12
68,208 Batman #674
67,833 Countdown #11
67,792 Countdown #10
67,383 Countdown #9
64,197 Wolverine #62
58,045 Ultimate Spider-Man #119
We are estimating actual sales by Diamond U.S. (primarily to North American comic stores), using Diamond's published sales indexes and publisher sales data to estimate a sales number for Batman (the anchor title Diamond uses in its calculations), and using that number and the indexes to estimate Diamond's sales on the remaining titles. We can check the accuracy of our numbers by comparing the Batman number that we calculate using multiple data points; our numbers for Batman are within 1/10 of 1% of each other, ensuring a high degree of accuracy.
For an analysis of the dollar trends in February, see "Comic and Graphic Novel Sales Dip in February."
For our estimates of actual orders to Diamond
For our estimates of actual orders to Diamond
For our estimates of actual orders to Diamond
For our estimates of actual orders to Diamond
For our index to our reports on the top comic and graphic novel preorders for January 2000 through February 2008, see "ICv2's Top 300 Comics and Top 100 GNs Index."
In February
Posted by ICv2 on March 17, 2008 @ 11:00 pm CT
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