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DC should just call itself “Bloodlines Comics” to better reflect where its priorities are (spoiler: stuck in 1993).

Survivors’ Club and Last Gang in Town ended last week.

Slash & Burn, by virtue of Vertigo’s lowest-selling title for April 2016, ended that month.

Seriously — are trade sales of Doctor Fate what keeps that book going? Paul — come back to the Legion!

I’m curious why Midnighter and Martian Manhunter, both great books that are being cancelled, are being kicked to the curb while Doctor Fate, selling worse than both of those, is apparently continuing post Rebirth? Makes no sense. Maybe you’re right, Steve, and it’s trades sell well?

RE: Green Lantern: Edge of Oblivion – I am still for about the 3rd month wondering why the numbers for GL: Lost Army are not included in the past counts.

As for Bloodlines, I remain convinced that DC has to do things with titles every once in a while for some reason in the family of trademarks/copyrights. There are too many times when older names get thrown out for no reason. Like “Star-Spangled Comics featuring G.I.Zombie” – why not just “G.I.Zombie”?

Catwoman getting a new creative team due to low sales, and immediately losing ~30% of sales seems like some weird karma thing. I assume it’ll be cancelled at Rebirth.

Man, those are some ugly numbers on some of these books. The trend towards a 20% loss without a freely order variant is pretty distressing also. Really hope DC can turn this around….

I always feel weird, asking myself who are those people buying comics only for their cover? Are they aliens? What do they do with it? Do they eat food? Do they ever read the comics they purchased?

This might be more work than you want to do, but, damn, I’m starting to itch for asterixes next to books with FOVs so that you cn glance at the list and understand the context….

I wish you hadn’t written all of that nuts pre-speculation — it was really unfocused and almost certainly wrong in many many ways.

-B

“I always feel weird, asking myself who are those people buying comics only for their cover?”

It’s more likely that some people are buying more than one copy.

Like in the 90’s? Yuk! It would be really interesting to know the proportion beetween one and the other. I do think there is probably actual readers buying multiple issues -if so, why do they prefer to buy a copy with a different cover of a comics they already pruchased instead of somethign else to read, when the current market is offering so many nice differents reading experience?. But I’m pretty sure there is also a proportion of people buying an issue only for the variant, which would explian how very low selling titles see sometimes such a big jump whenever they play the variant card. It seems that there is a core number of buyers buying variant, no matter the title, but depending on the variant subject popularity.

Contrarily to the 90’s ugly trends, current variants seem to rely solely on art, no gimmicky shenanigans, therefore rest of the shoulders of the artist’s fame and the low print run. I’d be curious to see how the back issue market treats those. Might be a decent investment, in our uncertain times. I think Bleeding Cool has some kind of column tracking that kind or bargain/profit opportunity, every now and then for hot items. Does someone know if one ever provided some kind of statistics on recent variants?

Couple things on the FOV:

I haven’t historically gotten variants, but about a year ago Discount Comic Book Service began offering a package where if you bought all of the FOV for a given month you got them at a bigger discount. Since I was getting most of the titles anyway, I started getting those. Thus I discovered a couple things.

One is that owning the variant is great an all, but there’s this bit of weirdness of having this book and not having any way to know, from the book itself, what the “real” cover looks like. I’m actually kinda happy that the coloring-book covers are just on top of the regular covers, rather than replacing them. So in that context, I can kinda see someone buying both versions, to be able to own both covers.

Also, while I don’t follow it closely, it does seem that the FOV are increasing in value. I use ComicBase, which has its own price guide-type info, and I run a little report regularly to see which books are currently valued over cover price. The FOVs generally end up on that list. So despite the fact that they are as available as the regular books, there’s still some sort of aftermarket demand.

Worth noting I am not comparing the FOV guide value to the non-FOV version of the same books, but I’m pretty sure it’s just the FOV’s that are going up.

Is that for freely orderable ones, or all variants?

Why do people buy variants? I’ve never understood it. Do they actually appreciate in value?

A quick spreadsheet analysis of the Top 300 GNs:
(All dollar figures are (number of copies) x (cover price))

November 2015: 60,247 copies in the top ten

Top Ten $1,083,448.53

Top 100 $4,535,671.02

Top 300 $7,121,023.33

November 2014: 82,728 copies in the top ten

Top Ten $1,728,357.72

Top 100 $5,567,719.80

Top 300 $8,799,531.67

It is possible, actually quite likely, that given the high number of orders placed for the variant issues, many stores had less fewer dollars to spend on graphic novels.
November 2015: Top Ten comics: $9,826,431.81
November 2015: Top TWO comics: $4,557,996.97
November 2014: Top Ten comics: $3,584,439.18

Batman, the index title, ranked #13 in Nov15, #3 in Nov14 (107K : 115K)

The graphic novel drop partly owes to stronger competition: last November saw a new Walking Dead volume and the first Saga hardcover. Graphic novel performance was strong enough last year that I led with it in my analysis, which doesn’t usually happen: http://blog.comichron.com/2014/12/november-2014-comics-sales-estimates.html

Torsten and I posted at the same time. Yes, when we’re talking GNs at Diamond the numbers are much more sensitive to big hit releases; the Saga hardcover and the Walking Dead volume each kicked in about $400k last November, explaining half the overall difference.

When overall GN sales are in the $17-18 million range as they were this November, the lack of a single book like that lops off more than 2% from the category on its own.

(Well, they don’t explain half the overall difference, but rather half the difference in the Top 300 GN grouping. About half of GN dollar sales each month are uncaptured in the Top 300.)

My guess is that DK III’s reign at the top will be short-lived, probably not as quickly as Before Watchmen started to disappear, but by about Issue 3 or 4 it’ll end up towards the back-half of the Top 10.

Interesting that the TOP 10 GRAPHIC NOVELS & TRADE PAPERBACKS had 4 titles with female lead characters-Princess Leia, Ms Marvel, Spider-Gwen, and Vampirella, and arguably a fifth if you include, and a strong argument exists for it, Saga.

That seems to be an unusual line-up and hopefully points to a changing, more inclusive marketplace for mainstream American comics.

So much derision, yet DK is number one? Anyone have an analysis?

“So much derision, yet DK is number one?”

Yes: people didn’t know what it was like before they bought it. It usually goes in that order.

[…] Apocalypse Wars Curtain Vox best of 2015 Warren Publishing Archive Classic Cover Recreations Dark Knight and Sandman lead November sales, but Marvel still #1 Salon Best of 2015 RAFAEL GRAMPÀ On Doing Comic Books & Movies On His Own Terms Witness the […]

Brandon should love TDK2, it’s great. That’s the kind of idiosyncratic comic I’d like to see more of from the Big Two.

They already said Hulk was going to be in Thor Ragnarok.

Softballs.

Pretty much a non-event, which I guess is progress for him. Given that a company has a product to hawk, it’s no surprise the questions were highly-filtered creampuffs.

Just generally, twitter is a completely awful medium for anything but disjointed pithy blurbs.

We need to put out another Dark Knight Returns book this year! Let’s call it a trilogy!! Like we planned it all along!

Before I read the explanation below, I thought the “Your Logo Here” was some kind of weird joke about the blood forming a Bat-like shape.

Putting the retailer logo there is almost a brilliant idea, except it’s kind of weird to have two logos so close to each other and at a weird diagonal where it looks un-designed.

The initial joke I thought was there now makes me feel like this is a wasted opportunity: wouldn’t it be so much funnier to have the retailer include their store logo in an image where a villain is *doing something* to their logo? There’s a long tradition of destroying-the-logo covers, how great would be to have an incentive cover where DC or Marvel offers to have a character destroying YOUR logo?

Wait, they want fans to shell out that much money without even telling them what the content of the mini comic is gonna be? Where do they get the balls, honestly?