Comic piece sales dropped almost across the board in July vs. the previous issues.  Only two titles in the top 25 comics, Avengers #500 and Spectacular Spider-Man #17, went up; sales on all the rest of non-#1s in the top 25 comics went down.  Sales on the #1 title for the month, 143,712 on Superman/Batman #11, were the lowest for a #1 title since February. 

 

The bottom of the Top 300 was also lower.  Sales on the bottom title on the Top 300 list in July were also down substantially (from over 1300 to around 1000) from the bottom title in June.

 

DC had an unusually good month, with the top three books (Superman/Batman #11, Superman #207, and Identity Crisis #2) and eight of the top 25.

 

In graphic novels, Dark Horse had the top slot and three of the top ten; DC had four of the top ten, Marvel two, and Wizard one.  Sales on the Dark Horse Star Wars Clone Wars TP, 9,463, topped the charts, but DC's Batman Hush Vol. 1 sold almost as many at almost twice the cover price.   

 

The top 25 comics, with our estimates of the sales to comic stores by Diamond Comic Distributors during July were as follow:

 

143,712            Superman/Batman #11

138,984            Superman

129,852            Identity Crisis #2

129,362            Astonishing X-Men #3

105,617            Avengers #500

  98,963            Ultimate Spider-Man #62

  96,961            Uncanny X-Men #446

  93,572            Ultimate X-Men #49

  93,164            X-Men #159

92,923            Ultimate Fantastic Four #9

  84,750            Amazing Spider-Man #510

  75,508            Marvel Knights Spider-Man #4

  69,026            Batman #630

  66,589            Wolverine #17

  65,658            Teen Titans #13

  64,615            JLA #101

  63,249            JLA #102

  63,007            Supreme Power #11

  57,740            Excalibur #3

  56,795            Venom Vs. Carnage #1

  55,304            New X-Men #3

  53,847            Justice League Elite #3

  52,936            Daredevil #62

  52,004            Army of Darkness Ashes 2 Ashes #1

  51,335            Spectacular Spider-Man #17

 

We are estimating actual sales by Diamond U.S. (primarily to North American comic stores) rather than pre-orders (as we did for the past several years) because Diamond recently changed its reporting and began basing its indexes on actual sales (see 'ICv2 Kicks Off New Top 300 Reporting').  We use those indexes and publisher sales data to estimate a sales number for Batman (the anchor title diamond uses in its calculations), and use 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 accurcy.

 
Because of that change, we will not be able to do year over year comparisons until February of 2004, but in general, it's an improvement to have actual numbers to work with rather than preorders, which have significant differences from sales.

 

 

For an analysis of the dollar trends in July, see 'Comic Dollars Flat in July.'

 

For our estimates of actual orders to Diamond U.S. from comic specialty stores on comic books scheduled to ship during July, see 'Top 300 Comics Actual--July 2004.'

 

For our estimates of actual orders to Diamond U.S. from comic specialty stores on graphic novels scheduled to ship during July, see 'Top 100 Graphic Novels Actual--July 2004.'

 

For our estimates of actual orders to Diamond U.S. from comic specialty stores on comic books scheduled to ship during June, see 'Top 300 Comics Actual--June 2004.'

 

For our estimates of actual orders to Diamond U.S. from comic specialty stores on graphic novels scheduled to ship during June, see 'Top 100 Graphic Novels Actual--June 2004.'

 

For our index to our reports on the top comic and graphic novel preorders for January 2000 through July 2004, see 'ICv2's Top 300 Comics and Top 100 GNs Index.'