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I’d been wondering how Spawn #200 could be a top 10 seller. That’s a very low figure for the four slot.

Wow. #300 sold an estimated 1,291 copies!

December 2010 = 3,811
November 2010 = 2,814
January 2010 = 2,357

So, are stores selling less product in January? Or does the average comics customer have a fixed budget each week, and spends the same amount each week?

MEMO

RE: numerical abbreviations

I has come to our attention that you are still using pre-Information-Age abbreviations in headlines, such as “G” (short for “grand”) as an abbreviation for “thousand”. This usage has been superceded.

As of 01/01/Y2K, “G” (short for “giga”) is now the abbreviation for “billion”. The abbreviation for “thousand” is now “K” (short for “kilo”). Thank you for your compliance.

-The World Government Department of Names and Numbers :)

How much does Borders’ decline and store closures factor into these numbers? If you check my Twitter feed — link above — I have some pics up of my neighborhood store in Hollywood, CA and the WEIRD way they are suddenly compressing the graphic novel section (by hanging wacked-out Marvel posters to hide the big patches of empty shelfspace).

> How much does Borders’ decline and store
> closures factor into these numbers?

These particular numbers are said to come from Diamond Comic Distribution’s sales to comic book specialty stores, and so shouldn’t be overly impacted by (or reflective of) anything going on at Borders or like traditional-book-trade channels.

116K = -250.87 degrees Fahrenheit

The SI standard is “k”.

http://www.bipm.org/en/si/prefixes.html

Americans, being substandard and/or anti-establishmentarian, do use “K” to denote “thousands”, primarily in financial terms.

I would like to see the term “megadollar” used in everyday conversation.

$1000 is a kilodollar! I mean come on, a dollar is made up of 100 centidollars right?

It is worriesome that the market is really going down fast as I stated on a previous comment a few weeks ago, could the digital wave be hurting comics like it did with the music industry and movies? Alot of people rip off entire runs lik the walking dead for example without paying a dime. Check out :

http://cbgxtra.com/comic-book-sales-charts-analysis

Look a January 2005 thru 2010….the top 25 books are down every single year substantially. In 2005 book #25 would sell in the 50k now it is barely holding on the 40k….that is 20% drop and consistant in the top 100 on….hopefully the industry will survive in the long run…but it is looking rather down.

“could the digital wave be hurting comics like it did with the music industry and movies? Alot of people rip off entire runs lik the walking dead for example without paying a dime.”

Indeed, I have seen people offering free scans of the complete Walking Dead series in multiple places. According to the sales charts posted on The Beat, it is also the ONLY comic book with sales that have increased almost every single month since shortly after its debut (now selling around 10,000 more copies than it did five years ago), with collected versions that continually hover around the top of the graphic novel sales listings (the icv2 article quoted above has a link to Jan’s numbers, and the first volume is sitting at #2).

So that series was a really bad example to use when making your point. :p

If anything, the collapse of Borders presumably ought to result in some customers transferring to comic stores and thus increasing the numbers.

As for whether piracy does any serious damage to the numbers, there’s so much conflicting evidence on that sort of thing that all you can really do is shrug your shoulders and say, who knows?

Paul, I hope you’re right about that, but I think a book chain closing is more likely to result in people just giving up on the hobby. Only devotees follow niche art/entertainment to whatever hard-to-find spot in sets up shop in. Look at all the geek-friendly tv shows that get moved to Friday night time slots, only to be canceled because most viewers don’t bother following along.

The biggest problem was the lack of new releases. Marvel saved more than 50% of their entire output for the month until January 26.
 
Some of the dearth of product could be because of publishers adapting to Diamond’s new Day Early Delivery-inspired product receiving deadlines, as well. With boxes getting picked and shipped earlier (sometimes more than a day early), products have to be received by Diamond earlier as well. Publishers might have (MIGHT!) slowed their publishing schedule a bit to give Diamond some time to adjust.

The more I think about these numbers, it looks like 20,000 monthly readers have left the hobby. Now the $3.99 price point has caught up to the rest of the market. I really believe that Marvel is strangling the direct market to death.

What’s the difference between an Indie publisher and a Small publisher?

Indie is anyone not in the front of PREVIEWS.

Small Press is anyone outside of the top ten publishers for the previous year.

“It’s fitting that September’s top selling comic features an image of Wolverine crouching atop a giant turd”

Ha!

Seriously, though, as Wolverine covers go, that one is pretty terrible, and I usually like Jae Lee a lot.

Any word on when we will see the August Month to Month sales charts? My cursory look at the numbers from ICv2 and July’s numbers showed some results I thought were quite surprising, but I was thinking I might have read them wrong, so was waiting for the MTMs to make sure I wasn’t misreading.

I have to say that we took a hit as well, however my customer transaction count was perfectly fine. It was the amount of items that people where buying that went down a bit. With no serious line wide events to drive customers into “I gotta have it”, and the release of mini series and one shots that mean nothing to main titles they stem from hurt a bit as well as people where not sure about picking those up.

I’ve seen posts advocating more events — Richard George at IGN has practically pleaded for them. However, the “illusion of change” policy of the Big Two and the supposed importance of events directly contradict each other. If the outcome of “n” events is a return to the status quo for “n” characters or a return to an old status quo (the stated purpose of HOUSE OF M, since Marvel Editorial wanted to recycle mutant persecution themes), what is the point of any of the material? The readers are being played for suckers.

I have some residual enthusiasm for cosmic storylines, but I’m skipping CHAOS WAR because the premise — an existing Japanese mythological pseudo-god becomes an entity that threatens the multiverse — is nonsensical. There’s about as much chance of the multiverse being destroyed convincingly as there is of Marvel Editorial quitting en masse and becoming Franciscan monks and nuns. In the current NEW AVENGERS arc, the first four issues are basically toilet paper because Bendis abandoned the premise for issue #1 — that the Eye of Agamotto was needed to prevent the dimension from being invaded by demons — a purpose it never had — and changed the premise in #5 to Agamotto wanting his Eye back as a weapon to use in self-defense — another purpose the Eye never had, and a request that couldn’t reasonably be refused.
If a fan fiction writer reaches a dead end in a storyline, he has sense enough to scrap the story and start over, and he doesn’t charge for his story anyway. Marvel Editorial is acting as if nothing is wrong.

Things have reached the point where Marvel might be cutting down the production of titles only because they can’t think of ways to recycle story material without embarrassing themselves.

SRS

All I have ti say is “I told you guys so”.

100% the internet’s fault.

it’s time to reshuffle the considerable talent that marvel has on their books. wouldn’t it be nice to see avengers books written by someone else other than bendis? so many good candidates to choose from (hickman, aaron, fraction.) Bendis would be great on a book like Shang Chi or Namor. think about it! (he’s already supposed to be working on Moon Knight which is a promising sign!)

People have been wondering for years now how to account for the falling sales of monthly comics. Was it price increases? Event books? Digital piracy? Or was it, as we now suspect, because of how Bendis wrote the Eye of Agamotto?

Or was it, as we now suspect, because of how Bendis wrote the Eye of Agamotto?

I mentioned the NEW AVENGERS storyline because it’s an excellent example of both authorial and editorial incompetence that have gone unnoticed by readers except for those who know Dr. Strange’s history. If the writing were done as a class project anywhere, from junior high school through college, it would receive a failing grade because the problems with the premise and plot are so glaringly obvious.

What is someone supposed to read into the non-reaction from readers who aren’t Dr. Strange fans? That they think superhero stories are so junky that even minimal editorial standards can’t be applied to them? Or that those readers buy the comics primarily for the artwork and whatever the characters do and say doesn’t matter, as long as they look good?

If the quality of the storytelling in any particular issue isn’t a factor in marketing the product to people, what else is there, besides gimmicks that don’t appeal to a reader’s intellect?

SRS

I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. If a majority of people who read New Avengers (and I’ll admit now that I am not one of them) don’t have a deep enough understanding of Dr. Strange’s history to recognize that apparently Bendis has contradicted some of it, why does it matter then? Why would that cause readership to drop? Are you saying that NA would be selling over 100,000 copies if they catered to people who remember Dr. Strange comics from the 70s? Because the relative merits of those comics aside, do you really believe that they even factor into a comic buyer’s mind when he is opening his wallet at the comic shop? “I’d buy this, but it doesn’t seem to jibe with what I read in Strange Tales 123″?

There’s two markets to serial fiction (and anything with a dedicated fan base):
1) The fans who know chapter-and-verse, and who will notice mistakes.
2) The casual reader just looking for a good story.

I saw it constantly at the bookstore. People would see “Wicked” on Broadway, and want to read the Maguire book, who know the MGM movie, but haven’t read the book by Baum. They don’t care that the movie or play contradict canon from the Baum books. They just want a good story they are familiar with.

For fans, it might be something as simple as “Peter Parker would never make a deal with the devil.” Or, “Superman never curses”. If the fan is disenchanted, they’ll find something else to bespell them. It could be girls, or cars, or a video game.

One can read “Kingdom Come” and enjoy the story of how superheroes “work” in the real world. One can also read it and look for The Cosby Kids, Wendy and Marvin, and Heidi MacDonald.

The best stories, they have the Bullwinkle Effect. You notice things on the second or third reading, or you discover things you didn’t notice as a child or teen.

“Richard George at IGN has practically pleaded for them.”

Richard George is an idiot and IGN is a plague on comics. Those guys are getting paid per cliche.

I agree with RJT but I think the point is that Bendis not following Dr. Strange continuity may be a symptom of a larger problem with his writing. I think it’s stupid to have him write TWO Avengers books with almost identical casts. I admit though that he does write a good Namor.

I want to ask a question that I believe I know the amsswer to – so here’s the question. The charts that ICv2 uses are sales into comic shops from Diamond – correct?

When someone verifies that I am not insane I will follow up with a comment.

1) Regular publishers of graphic novels hold their good stuff for the Fall and Holiday season. Comics publishers do the same, and anything else which might be a best seller is released in July, to coincide with San Diego. However, 2010’s August would be similar to 2009’s August.

2) How does the first nine months of 2010 compare to the same nine months from 2009?

3) The bigger picture: the Top 300 charts are also an indicator on how well Diamond is doing as a business. Unlike the quarterly reports a publicly traded business issues, we get monthly reports.

4) In the bookstore business, the chains are shifting emphasis to stuff which can’t be downloaded, such as toys and gifts. Are comics shops shifting their product mix to t-shirts, toys, and games?

5) Mr. Miller, if you intend to compare sales over a multiple of years, may I suggest you use a vertical bar graph, where each month is grouped together? This way, a month’s sales can be compared from year to year, and by following the color from month to month, trends can easily be discerned. That plate of spaghetti featured above is almost impossible to decode. If that’s not possible, then please stretch the y-axis scale. Or better yet, flip the axes, using the x-axis for the dollar figures.

6) Has anyone produced one long historical graph? Can the graph be run through a stock-market analyzer to predict trends and the general profitability?

CRAP! Got hit by the email bug!
The above post is by me, not Marc Deering.

I caught the mistake two seconds after I hit “submit”. My apologies to Mr. Deering.

Yes, Rich.

-B

It certainly seems to be the time for all things “Thor” now in the lead up to the 2011 movie. The proliferation of comics, games, figurines and various other artefacts.

I can recall a time not so long ago when it was the opposite. Michael Oeming had finished his magnificent “Rune Thor” comic book series and there was a long hiatus before JMS took over for a while as comic book writer for Thor.

During that “hiatus” about the only thing being written on Marvel Thor were my various fan fiction stories. You can still enjoy them. Just scroll down below my author profile and you will see over 40 fan fiction stories here:
http://www.fanfiction.net/u/1276881/David_Scholes

Cheers

Brian – thanks for clarifying. These are orders in people! Not an indication of how books are selling at comic shops. We seem to have an unusual penchant for analyzing everything about this medium. I can’t think of another part of publishing that gets dissected like comics and graphic novels. I love numbers – but I think this sends people into a unwarranted tizzy.

Marc, it’s INTENDED to be a plate of spaghetti. The individual years there aren’t intended to be pieced through — rather, the idea is that we see that the red line is, generally, within the bounds of the pack. If you visit the link to my site, you’ll see charts with the key years pieced out.

I have long historical graphs here: http://www.comichron.com/vitalstatistics/alltime.html

And in answer to another of your questions, the first eight months of 2010 compare thusly to 2009:
Comics periodical units, down 6%;
Comics periodical dollars, down 3%;
Top-selling TPBs, down 9%%;
Combined Top 300 comics & trades, down 4%;
OVERALL (including all Diamond comics, trades, and magazines), down 5%

And, Rich, the charts you see at ICV2 and my site are based on the raw tables that Diamond releases, and which appear on its website; we use known comics sales to figure out what their index number is, and thus zero in on the estimates we provide.

Marc=Torsten. I stand corrected!

Yeah, I’d actually considered making all the non-2010 years the same color, since the point of this particular graphic was not specific comparisons, but just to superimpose all the monthly tracks and show that most of them existed in a narrow range. But I was pretty sure there would be a “what year is THAT?” question on some of the outlying years.

Anyway, if you’d like to compare individual months from year to year, I do that on every individual monthly page on my site — 1-year, 5-year, and, where available, 10-year tracks going back to the 1990s. Just go to http://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales.html.

The thing is, Rich (or should I say, “Gigi”?) that the odds are terrific that actual sell through is significantly lower. Speaking very very generally retailer orders lag behind the actual real-world demand by at least a month on the chart.

In other words, on an August chart, you’re actually seeing the reflection of what retailers thought the customers would buy based on sales in July, or, in some/many cases, June or even May.

-B

Thanks! Those charts are helpful.

Torsten asked a question about previous Augusts for the tpbs over at http://www.indignantonline.com/2010/09/14/the-great-august-graphic-novel-collapse/
and when I pulled the August numbers back to 2003 (when you only saw the top 50 tps)… you certainly could interpret the sales level dropping back to something similar to ‘03, depending on where you extrapolate the 1000-copy level falling.

Coming out of a boom cycle does look like a reasonable theory. We’ll see what next month’s charts look like. You’d think it would take a little longer for any trickle-down from people giving up on the monthlies to people giving up on the trades.

My feeling has been all along that if any portion of the direct market was going to be more sensitive to the general economy, it was going be trades and particularly hardcovers, which tie up relatively more retailer dollars per SKU than comics. A relatively modest trimming of inventory levels in stores in the “long tail” is usually enough to shake up the whole chart. An interesting measure would be what the turn-rates are right now for key trades in stores; that would tell us a lot, if it could be tracked nationwide.

1) I think things will either get better or they will get worse.

2) The “satisfying chunk” is still out there, still being offered by a number of people, it just doesn’t always feature Marvel or DC superheroes. It’s not dead by any means. It’s just not popular with creators or editorial, because the satisfying chunk isn’t easy to put together anymore without Stan Lee captions, and no one wants to tell their two-issue arc in two issues anymore when they can make six issues worth of paychecks and then get a thicker, more expensive book collection out and perhaps royalties as the cherry on top. And, this method of plotting/writing also allows folks to write more books per month, nosing arcs along with fewer panels, more spreads, less actual writing. Unless they’re dialogue fetishists, and just type whatever the editor allows.

3) That crazy color chart looks more like Galactus’ Best Friends Bracelets collection than a plate of spaghetti. To me, at least.

4) This is fun! Anybody can do this! Blah blah blah, my opinions have merit because I put them on the internet. I’m a comic industry pundit! Wheeee!

5) BTW, the sky is falling.

6) Please forget anything I’ve said, because no one will bring it up later, anyway, when they’re discussing more charts and trends and doing comparisons and hitting the mark of things about as often as a carny fortune teller.

7) Atlas/Seaboard’s back, we’re saved! Satisfying chunks are Comin’ At Ya, in 3-D!

I understand completely if few people get that last reference, because I am sad.

9) I need some better hobbies.

10) The first rule of Fight Club is, Fight Club really wasn’t very good.

How the hell did a smiley face appear instead of the #8? I’ve never put an emoticon out in the world in my life.

I feel sick…

It’s payback…I deserve it, I guess…

The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk badly about Fight Club.

You made that up! You did!

Length correlates with budget here and it is a more general point that summer blockbusters have increasingly stretched to tortuous lengths. I agree that it would be healthy for Nolan to make a film for the budget of The Prestige (about a quarter of The Dark Knight) but presumably he is about to plunge straight into Batman 3

Hi Matt. I recently discovered your blog & love what I've read so far. It's proving quite the task to catch up (at this rate I never will) but it's well worth it.

Anyway, your length-focused criticism of Inception is one that I've seen applied increasingly more often in the past few years in respect to films in general. Perhaps it's just the venue of analysis your blog provides, but this is the first time I've given the issue much thought, & my stance, for now, is that using length itself as a focal point for criticism is beating a straw dog. After all, 2001: A Space Odyssey & The Godfather are also very long films, but I've never once heard complaints about that regarding the latter, while every person I've spoken to who did not enjoy the former indicated length as the primary reason for their dissatisfaction: my point being, I think additional factors are responsible for a film feeling too long. It actually has very little to do with the run-time itself (though of course a 90 minute film will always feel shorter than a 120+ minute one).

I think the blog post by Dennis Cozzalio you mentioned (thanks for that) contains a better idea of what lies beneath the oppressiveness of the run-time: while far from the only factors, both pacing & tone contribute a great deal to how long a feature feels, as well as how “comfortable” one finds the length. I don’t have the link, but I recall a blog post from back when The Dark Knight came out; its premise was that the frenetic & relentless pace of TDK (as well as its uniformly dour tone) accounted for the length criticism, & that - ironically - extending some shots, lingering on scenes, would have made it feel shorter even if doing so would actually prolong the experience.

For my part, Inception didn’t feel long to me. I think I tend to have more patience than others regarding movie length (I consider 2001 the best film ever made, long or not), but I can still understand where people are coming from. Editing is probably the greatest lost art in film for the better part of the past two decades, perhaps longer, & I think most directors don’t understand how to correctly pace films anymore in respect to their content. It’s a bit baffling. Nolan, in my book at least, covered his ass by having Inception’s form mirror its content: the labyrinthine nature of the narrative structure ties in to the desired architecture of the dreams, & the film seeming too long resembles how more time passes in dreams than in reality. Still, there are plenty of other criticisms to weigh it down, namely how thin most of the characters were. On a side note, I think Cillian Murphy & Marion Cotillard’s work saved this film from being a complete let down.

Thanks, gentlemen, for the great comments -- you're absolutely right about length and budget, Martin. There are lots of reasons, I think, for what feels (I haven't crunched any data) like a general move toward longer films, and I've certainly nothing against length per se (I much prefer the longer version of The New World, for instance). It's a purely subjective sense of what feels justified for the story, and I certainly know various viewers respond in different ways -- most of the audience I saw the short version of New World with seemed to hate it and think it was way too long, and plenty of folks I know thought Inception and The Dark Knight flew by. I filled the post with personal qualifiers because I know there are lots of viewers who feel exactly the opposite of me. I just thought the trend was worth noting.

Ryan's mostly right, I think, that length is an ancillary element of our evaluation of any film. I don't entirely agree that a 90 minute film will always feel shorter than a 120 minute film. While that's certainly mostly true, something like Tarkovsky's My Name is Ivan at 95 minutes probably feels longer to most viewers than Casino Royale at 144 minutes. The first time I saw Public Enemies (140 mins), I was sure Michael Mann had made his shortest movie in ages, and was stunned to find out what time it was when I left the theatre!

My sense of Dark Knight feeling eternal was more from getting more and more angry at the story, cinematography, and editing choices as it went along than from its pace, really. The length just meant my frustrations with the film were going on and on and on...

I'm totally with you, Ryan, on Cillian Murphy and Marion Cotillard. I loved them both, and have loved them in everything I've seen them in -- I was just telling somebody today that he should see Breakfast on Pluto and The Wind that Shakes the Barley to see some more wonderful work by Murphy. I've seen some criticism of Cotillard for her role in Inception, and I don't at all agree with it, but I also thought she was fabulous in Public Enemies, and even some defenders of that film hated her. There's something about her performances in English that seems to really bother some people. I actually thought all the performances in Inception were good -- my frustrations with Nolan are generally not about his actors (though I agree with Jim Emerson that he didn't seem to know what to do with the goldmine that was Heath Ledger's performance). I thought DiCaprio gave one of his best performances in Inception, oddly enough -- it's somewhat similar, as many people have said, to his work in Shutter Island, but I didn't particularly care for him there (I was indifferent to the movie, but have resigned myself to the fact that I am indifferent to Scorcese's films in general). In Inception, he's especially good in silent moments -- he's really learned to use his eyes to convey entire worlds of emotion and possibility. I love Joseph Gordon-Levitt in anything, and Tom Hardy is, I expect, likely to be seen as one of the great actors of our time, if he can keep getting good roles (he has brief moments of wonder in Inception, but to really see what he can do, we have to look at something like Bronson).

Matt ill spend time to watch this movie

I myself have noted a trend toward longer comments on the Mumpsimus...so that sometimes it feels that they extend beyond the length of the original post. But that may be due simply to their differing appearance, which is to say a decrease in the horizontal but an increase in the vertical. I have considered copying the posts and the resulting comments into Word so that I can do an accurate word/letter count, but I will leave that for the true blog aficionados. Now it is on to see what Hal Duncan has to say!
--Ralph

Your attempt at cleverness is noted, Ralph. Now I'll just wait for you to pay me $150 million for my latest blog posts.