Mayo Report for 2019-Summary
|
|
Top Comics List Top Trades List
The top 300 comics per month in 2019 had a high of 7,961,142 units and a low of 5,368,978 units with an averaged of 6,411,391 units a month during 2019. That average is a little below the 6,616,675 units monthly average for the top 300 comics during the final order era which started in February 2003 when Diamond switched from reporting preorders to reporting invoiced sales to stores. Marvel averaged 3,150,754 units a month which is up from the 2,953,137 units average for 2018 and is aboeve the 3,006,693 units a month average for Marvel during the final order era. DC averaged 2,095,790 units a month which is down from the 2,323,705 units per month average during 2018 and is slightly below the 2,373,146 units a month average for DC during the final order era.
The best selling comic is 2019 was Detective Comics #1000 with 574,705 units. Spawn #300 was the next best selling comic with 275,749 units. X-Men #1 came in third place with 269,153 units. Fifty-five comics sold over 100,000 units in 2019. Unsurprisingly, most of the items at the top of the yearly sales list were either milestone issues like Detective Comics #1000 and Spawn #300 or first issues like X-Men #1, Black Cat #1 and DCeased #1.
Marvel accounted for 56.02% of the units in the top 300 comics of the year while DC accounted for 39.41%. The remaining 4.57% of the unit sales for the top 300 comics of 2019 was split across Image Comics with 3.91%, Dynamite Entertainment with 0.23%, IDW Publishing with 0.22% and BOOM! Studios with 0.21%.
Jonathan Hickman was the writer who seems to have sold the most units in the yearly top 300 comics with 2,471,583 units across various issues of House of X, Powers of X, X-Men and New Mutants. Tom King sold 2,226,908 units mainly with issues of Batman along with the issues of Heroes in Crisis which shipped in 2019.
Pepe Larraz was the artist with the most units in the yearly top 300 top comics list with 898,256 units all from House of X. R. B. Silva came in a close second place with 877,303 units all from Powers of X.
Looking at the monthly breakdown of the top 300 comics by publisher, we can see that Marvel had the largest portion of the sales every month of 2019. As should be expected, DC was always the publisher with the second largest portion of the sales in the top 300 comics followed by Image. October 2019 was the best sales of 2019.
Looking at the monthly change in the top 300 comics by publisher, we can see that Marvel is surprisingly stable most months with October and November as the notable exceptions. Even with a shipped cadence on a number of titles which doesn't map to the calendar months and a rotation of titles over time, Marvel sales didn't change much in March, May, June, August, September and December. In some of those other months, however, the delta for Marvel was massive. Much of the delta for Marvel in the fourth quarter were around the start and stop of House of X and Powers of X. In this case, the shifts were a good thing reflecting the renewed interest in the x-Men family of titles. DC, on the other hand, swung back and forth each month. Some of this was due to the intermittent shipped schedule of key titles like Doomsday Clock causing a rise and fall of sales based on if the title shipped or not.
Looking at the monthly breakdown of the top 300 by title status, we see continuing titles which lost sales usual accounted for the largest portion of the top 300 comics sales each month. July was the exception with continuing titles which gained sales being the largest category followed by new titles and the by the continuing titles which lost sales category.
Switching our perspective to how the total of the top 300 comics changed each month, we see unsurprisingly that new titles were the main upwards forces while the main downward forces were defunct titles, continuing titles which lost sales and suspended titles. The upswing ranged from as little as 1,197,623 units in February to as much as 2,892,853 in October while the downswing ranged from as little as 1,103,959 units in March to as much as 3,707,094 units in November. The inherent instability of the sales from month to month is obvious from the large upswing and downswing in most months. We wouldn't be seeing this sort of churn in sales with new titles attempting to plug the sales gap from defunct titles and the lost sales on continuing titles in a more stable market.
The net change from month to month ranges from as minor as a 189,935 unit drop in December to as much as the 1,792,950 units drop in November. Generally speaking, sales were up one month an down the next except during fourth quarter. October was a second month of increased sales in a row and both November and December had decreasing sales.
What we can see from 2019 is that the new title sales continue to be a key factor in maintaining sales and trying to grow sales from month to month. For Marvel, this seems to generally work out. For DC, not so much.
For a more in-depth discussion of the sales data, check out the Mayo Report episodes of the Comic Book Page podcast at www.ComicBookPage.com. The episode archived cover the past decade of comic book sales on a monthly basis with yearly recap episodes. In addition to those episodes on the sales data, every Monday is a Weekly Comics Spotlight episode featuring a comic by DC, a comic by Marvel and a comic by some other publisher. I read around 200 new comics a month so the podcast covers a wide variety of the comics currently published. If you are looking for more or different comics to read, check out the latest Previews Spotlight episode featuring clips from various comic book fans talking about the comics they love. With thousands of comics in Previews every month, Previews Spotlight episodes are a great way to find out about new comic book titles that may have flown under your comic book radar.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me at John.Mayo@ComicBookResources.com.
