Mayo Report for 2015-Summary
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Top Comics List Top Trades List
2015 had some ups and downs, the most notable being for Marvel between September and October, but the overall trend for the monthly top 300 comics was upward. This shouldn't be too much of a surprise since publishers cancel lower selling title and replace them with new titles. Between the Secret Wars event at Marvel and the Convergence event which put the mainstream DC titles on hiatus for two months, 2015 was far from a typical year. In the case of Convergence, the first month was good for DC but the second month wasn't. For Marvel, the turning point was the launching of the post-Secret Wars titles in October and November.
Since the top 1,000 comics list for 2016 did not include an index ranking, I used the known sales for the items on the list and calculated the minimum number of unreported units each item needed to rank as it did. While the Total Estimated Report Units estimates are as accurate as the data released from Diamond, both the unreported units and Estimated Yearly Total Sales are ballpark estimates and should be treated as such. All of the charts use the calculated estimates from the monthly top 300 lists.
The chart of both the units and dollars from month to month show a peak in both units and dollar in April and a valley in September:
These charts which split the units and dollars by publisher. We see strong initial interest in the post-Secret Wars titles at Marvel and what could be the start of a possible rebound for DC at the end of the year. Given the beginning of the calendar year is usually weak, it will be challenging for DC to get through the first quarter of 2016 with strong sales.
Overall, 2015 was a strong year for Marvel according to the top comics lists. Marvel had 40 of the 50 best-selling comics of 2015. DC only had eight in the top 50 and BOOM! Studios and IDW each placed one item in the top 50.
The rolling 12-month average has remained strong. As I mentioned in the past few years, the short lived nature of current titles could put the success of the past years at risk. Publishers are rolling over titles on a regular basis which runs contrary to the habitual nature of reading comics. Relaunching titles works against building story momentum and causes readers to have to work to keep track of ever changing titles.
The average and median sales are bouncing around a lot. The average is the total unit sales of the top 300 divided by 300 and the median is the sales at the middle of the list which equates to the average sales of the items at ranks 150 and 151. The average being higher than the median indicates outliers at the items topping the list which are biasing the average upwards. Both are low enough to put a Marvel or DC title are risk on cancellation but are also high enough to be considered fairly successful for a title published by any other publisher.
2015 was a year of transition for Marvel with virtually none of the titles from 2014 surviving into 2016. "Marvel Universe: Avengers Assemble: Season Two" which started in November 2014 and ends in February 2016 seems to be one of the few such titles. The result was massive turnover in volumes and titles at Marvel. The benefit was some strong first issue sales. The downside is a weakening of the sales power of first issues and steep second issue drops. The Secret Wars event was a success even with the delays at the end of the run with the eight issues published in 2015 selling a combined total in the ballpark of 1,964,349 units. Marvel had at least 69 items which sold over 100,000 units, 31 of which were first issues. The Star Wars property was a strong sales force for Marvel accounting for around 20% of the comic book unit sales for Marvel. "Star Wars" #1 sold at least 1,070,352 units and the franchise as a whole accounted for 7,761,318 units across the monthly top 300 comics lists for 2015.
The Convergence event at DC was far from a sales success. The second issues of seven of the related miniseries failed to make it into the top 1,000 comics for 2015. The nine issue "Convergence" series sold a total of a little over a million units. "Dark Knight III: The Master Race" #1 topped the list for DC with around 449,098 units. DC had 18 other items over 100,000 units with most of them being issues of "Batman" and "Convergence."
"We Stand On Guard" #1 was the best selling comic from Image in 2015 with at least 84,970 units beating out "The Walking Dead" #145 which was the best-selling issue of that series with 82,792 units. "The Walking Dead" dominated the sales for Image with 14 of the top 17 items for Image on the list.
"Orphan Black" #1 with 497,002 units both topped the sales for IDW and exceeded the total sales of the other 9 items from IDW in the top 1000 comics for 2015. There was a subscription box bulk purchase for that issue. "Back to the Future" #1 was the second best-selling title from IDW with at least 79,496 units, 75,028 of which were reported on the monthly top 300 comics lists. While the "Back to the Future" title dropped to around 25,000 units after the first issue, it has done well enough to get promoted from a miniseries to an ongoing series.
"Fight Club 2" was a clear winner for Dark Horse accounting for eight of the ten items the publisher had in the top 1,000 comics for 2015. "Archie vs Predator" #1 and #2 were the other two items. In 2014, all of the Dark Horse items on the top 1,000 comics list were the licensed properties: "Serenity: Leaves on the Wind," "Star Wars [Lucas Draft]" and the ongoing "Star Wars" title. Losing the Star Wars property didn't help Dark Horse. Dark Horse has 2,679,390 units across the monthly top 300 comics lists in 2014 and 2,220,287 units across the monthly top 300 for 2015. Given that the Star Wars titles accounted for 732,893 units in 2014, a drop of 459,103 units from year to year isn't bad.
Only 20 issues from the back half of Previews made the top 1,000 comics. "Bravest Warriors: Tales of Holo John" #1 topped that list with at least 502,736 units. "Archie" #1 did at least 109,388 units with 104,347 of that reported on the monthly lists. The second and third issues of "Archie" also made it on the list. "Rick and Morty" #1 sold at least 32,174 units to place where it did at rank 945 with 17,609 of those units reported on the monthly top 300 comics lists. given the upward trend on this title, it wouldn't surprise me to see multiple issues of "Rick and Morty" on best-sellers list for 2016.
"Saga" took the top three slots on the top 1,000 trades list for 2016. Note, that isn't the top three for just Image but for all publishers. Given the long shelf life of collected editions, the number of unreported units on the top 1,000 trades can really add up. Based on known reported units from the monthly top trades lists, Image sold the most trades with 1,037,590 units. Add in the potential unreported units and that total goes up to 2,156,218 units. DC, however, had reported sales of 1,019,380 units on the trades list with 2,062,300 potential unreported units adding up to 3,081,680 units. Marvel had known sales of 923,194 units with another 1,683,483 unreported units for a potential total of 2,606,677 units.
Overall, 2015 was the strongest year for the top 300 comics since the final order era began in 2003. While the first and third quarters were somewhat weak, the second and fourth quarters more than made up for it. The question is if the unit totals for the top 300 comics are indicative of the true health of the industry. Incentive covers, constant relaunches, bulk subscription box orders and other sales gimmicks tend to inflate the sales total beyond what the audience is interested in reading. Collecting and speculating on comics is fine but with it comes the risk of the speculator bubble bursting and sales plummeting. Around 172 comics on the monthly top 300 comics list from Marvel and DC sold below 10,000 units.
So while the state of things looks good from an aggregate perspective, it is the sales trends of the individual titles which might so the real state of the industry. The typical sales trend is down. Heavily at first and the slower after that. The result is titles lasting shorter and getting restarted more often. The average issue number on the top 300 list in December was 12.9. When I first started podcasting about comic book sales in December 2005, the average issue number was 51. So while the forest looks health, the tree might be dying. Hopefully that isn't the case but we should take our favorite comics for granted. Support the comics and creators you love and hopefully 2016 will be a great year for comics.
