Greetings, sales charts fans! It's time once again to look at DC's sales figures.
Things were bad for DC in January. How bad? With records going back to March 2003, DC had its second worst average sales on record of 21,845, just barely beating the March 2009 low point of 21,792. The Vertigo line had its lowest average sales on record by far: 6,832, beating the previous average low of 7,055 in March 2015. And the median sales for both lines was even lower: 24,624 & 5,802 respectively.
DC shipped twenty fewer comics in January as compared to December (74 versus 94). Two titles not shipping in January were two of DC's top sellers, Dark Knight III and Justice League. They moved a total estimated 1,616,524 comic units in January, compared to 2,640,519 in December, a difference of over a million units!
“In case you’re wondering, Superman has never dipped below 30K in the modern Diamond-served comics market. The lowest ever recorded sales were 31,504 for issue #697 back in February of 2010.”
superman 29 sold around 33k
Superman 29 $2.99 DC 33,633
“Despite being returnable, I believe there is some sort of restocking fee, plus the time involved in processing the returns—any retailers out there want to verify this?”
DC did NOT charge a restock fee this time (thankfully), and DC structured the program so that, in order to qualify, you had to order either half-of-BATMAN or BATMAN depending on the title — For example, ROBIN SON OF BATMAN was “order BATMAN”, while STARFIRE was “order half of BATMAN” — and you had to order like that on EVERY title, or NONE of them were returnable.
So, basically, they encouraged us to WILDLY over order.
-B
It’s super sad that DC encouraged wild over-ordering on such lame books.
The DC-YOU books were, by and large, just really lame and uncompelling.
You’re not going to shift PREZ copies without a HUGE name writer or artist. Further, someone who is ‘big in novels’ or ‘big in TV’ does not translate as big in comics.
I hear Superman American Alien is good (i’m not buying it) but the house Ads for it were just a picture of Max Landis. I don’t know who Max Landis is, but his picture makes me think i wouldn’t like his stuff (Hipster looking guy) – so, no sale.
I mean jesus, if Jonathan Hickman isn’t announced as a Rebirth Author – i’m f**king scared for DC and MOnthly Floppy comics overall. These are frightening/sad numbers.
There’s really no reason to buy floppies anymore. Why should we pay more for individual issues in which a third of the content is advertisements, when we can wait and pay less for an ad-free slicker bound version?
Floppies are a waste. Time to evolve, DC and Marvel.
Shame about some of those numbers. I’m enjoying Constantine, but I imagine it’s not going to survive whatever shake up is planned for Rebirth.
God, they really need to do something to promote those new Vertigo series. sSomething different thanv stopping the 9.99$ first trade and upping the floppy price to 3.99$ I mean.
Crazy idea. In my admittedly limited view, it’s seemed like DC always had an older audience than Marvel. Or to be more precise, Marvel grabbed a bigger chunk of the young/new reader market from the 1970s on.
Are these numbers fundamentally about the DC reader dying off?
Mike
@Skottie – because we don’t want to wait six months for the trade? And DC doesn’t want to pay writers/artists for six months without getting any revenue?
@Mbunge – dunno about that. Barring the Star Wars books, are the Marvel numbers THAT different?
@Zach: Why shouldn’t the Star Wars titles count? They’re comic books, right?
In terms of absolute numbers, the Marvel figures are a bit more of a mixed bag. But in relative terms there are quite a few Marvel titles that did better than DC’s books in January. The important caveat here is that there are a lot of #1 and #2 issues from Marvel since January was still an important month for their ANAD launch.
Batman #48 was DC’s best-selling title, and it placed #8 for the month at ~101K. There were six (3 SW, 3 super-hero issues) Marvel titles (plus one Image title) that sold better than that. The next highest DC issue came in at #24 on the Diamond countdown and only sold slightly better than half of Batman #48.
DC shipped 74 issues in January. Twenty-one Marvel issues *each* shipped more copies than 97% of DC’s output. Of those twenty-one issues, seventeen were super-hero issues.
DC had only 4 issues in January that shipped more than 45K according to ICv2. Marvel had thirty-one issues that shipped more than 45K and Image had two. So Marvel had thirty-one issues with bigger numbers than 94% of DC’s output.
When comparing DC numbers to Marvel numbers for January, yes, DC’s numbers are very soft relative to Marvel’s, and it isn’t just Star Wars issues.