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 U.S. from comic specialty stores on comic books scheduled to ship during February, see "Top 300 Comics Actual--February 2008."

For our estimates of actual orders to Diamond U.S. from comic specialty stores on graphic novels scheduled to ship during February, see "Top 100 Graphic Novels Actual--February 2008."

For our estimates of actual orders to Diamond U.S. from comic specialty stores on comic books scheduled to ship during January, see "Top 300 Comics Actual--January 2008."

For our estimates of actual orders to Diamond U.S. from comic specialty stores on graphic novels scheduled to ship during January, see "Top 100 Graphic Novels Actual--January 2008."

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."