For the first time this month, we've been able to analyze year-over-year trends in comic and graphic novel orders, and have found that the strong month-over-month trends as well as the anecdotal evidence from retailers are confirmed by an 8% year-over-year improvement between November 2000 and November 2001 dollar orders to Diamond North America from pop culture stores.   Comic orders were up 14% while graphic novel orders dipped 24% in the 2001 vs. 2000 comparison.  The over-all trend is the most significant, because graphic novel orders typically fluctuate much more month to month,  can be influenced by a relatively small number of titles, and account for a small percentage (usually under 20%) of the total.  Comic sales were stronger in 2001 at all levels -- the top 10 titles, the top 100 titles, the top 200 titles, and over-all.

We were also able to analyze year-over-year trends for the top comic publishers by using Diamond's market share information and the dollar totals we calculated for the top 300 comics, top 25 graphic novels, and top 10 magazines for November of the two years.  This analysis showed Marvel to be the big reason for the year-over-year increase, with a 36% difference between Marvel dollars in 2000 and 2001.  Image and Dark Horse dollars were also up by 7% and 2% respectively.  DC was down 10% in 2001 vs. 2000.  One caution on interpreting this data--it's only one month, and that can be influenced by a relatively small number of releases.  We will be doing longer term year-over-year analyses in the coming weeks to see if these trends are confirmed.