The output of comics and graphic novel publishers distributed to comic stores by Direct Market distributors dropped sharply in the COVID era, with April-July comic releases down 63% vs. the number of releases in the same months in 2019, and graphic novel releases down 18%.

The general pattern was that the number of comics and graphic novel releases to comic stores dropped to near zero in April, and have been climbing back since, but there were big differences between the two formats.

Although the number of comic releases has been steadily increasing, releases were still down 34% from year-ago levels in July.  Comic publishers have delayed some titles, canceled others, and converted some to digital-first release, with an eye toward reducing pressure on comic stores buying these products non-returnable.  That’s been positive for sell-through, and in some cases for raw orders, which for some titles are coming in higher at FOC than they did before the shutdown, publishers tell us.

Graphic novel releases, on the other hand, jumped dramatically in June and July, with 18% more titles released by Direct Market distributors in June 2020 than in the previous year, and 68% more titles released in July than in July 2019.  The reason is that graphic novels from many publishers continued to be released during April and May and distributed to the book channel.  Those releases, plus June and July releases, were then shipped through Diamond and its new competitors, pushing a flood of graphic novel releases, some of which had previously been released in other channels, out to comic stores in the past 60 days.

The analysis used 2020 title counts compiled by Comichron (used with permission) and reported in this Twitter thread.  Comichron harvested the counts of titles for most publishers from Diamond information, and for DCs from UCS Comic Distributors (see "DC To Resume Releasing New Comics through Two New Distributors").  We compared those title counts to title counts reported by Diamond Comic Distributors monthly in 2019.