By John Jackson Miller on 8/5/2008 8:30 PM

On occasion, I look back at the N.W. Ayer & Sons Directory — an annual publication that for a century included information on periodicals for the use of advertisers. In addition to publisher addresses and physical dimensions of their ad spaces, the Directories include information from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the B.P.A., postal statements of ownership, and more.

Comics publishers are included, and I have not generally spent much time on the records because titles are aggregated; the volume says which comics are included, but there's no title-by-title breakdown. Still, what they say about those totals is interesting, as we can see the publisher-by-publisher breakdowns.

Here's what the 1960 edition has, which means the numbers are coming likely from the end of 1959:

American Comics Group • 650,000 copies monthly
American Romance Group • 325,000 copies monthly
Archie • 3,216,979 copies bimonthly
Charlton • 5,000,000 copies bimonthly
Dell • 9,686,424 copies monthly
Dennis the Menace • no figures cited
Harvey • 5,029,759 copies bimonthly
Marvel • 2,253,112 copies monthly
National (DC) • 6,653,485 copies monthly

Now, of these, Archie, Harvey, Marvel, and National/DC's figures were all from ABC audits. The others are from publishers' estimates to Ayer & Sons; Charlton was a "sworn" statement to Ayer, according to the book. American Romance is actually another imprint of ACG, which included Confessions of the Lovelorn and My Romantic Adventures. Dennis the Menace is listed as a separate publisher but actually it's coming out of the Fawcett offices; regardless, there are no figures cited with it.

The monthly/bimonthly thing appears to be how the publishers were packaging their titles for ad buys — in that event, the monthly totals would look like this:
 
Dell • 9,686,424 • 37%
National (DC) • 6,653,485 • 25%
Harvey • 2,514,879 • 10% 
Charlton • 2,500,000 • 10% 
Marvel • 2,253,112 • 9% 
Archie • 1,608,489 • 6% 
ACG • 975,000 • 4%
TOTAL: 26,191,389 monthly copies

OK, now there are clearly some publishers missing (Dennis/Fawcett among them), and I'm iffy on bringing in some other magazines with some comics content, like Calling All Boys. But if we take these as given, they're not too far off the rank order we might imagine. Charlton may seem high, but recall this is 1959 — and Charlton was churning out Westerns and war comics like crazy. Harvey I'm wondering a little about, but they are ABC figures.

And there are some interesting things here, were we to take these as everything there was. Marvel would appear to be selling a million more comics in the direct market today than it was 50 years ago (3.27 million copies monthly, the average through 2008 to date); so much smaller was its publishing slate back then — or at least the list of titles under audit. And now we would have a minimum of 26.19 million for 1959 monthly circulation — or 314.3 million copies annually at at least $31.43 million retail.

But I don't want to take these as exactly given until I can do some cross-checking to see what the publishers were including in these batches and what they weren't. The Ayers listings for each publisher say which titles are counted in the totals; it's possible some books aren't, which would mean the totals printed above for these publishers are, again, lower than reality. Another issue is that we can't just take the Statements we've seen for 1960 and compare them; DC's 29 titles with Statements found so far for 1960 had a total of 8.75 million copies sold monthly, but remember that many of the titles on that list were not monthly, so that total shouldn't be counted as a monthly average.

So I'll be doing more work with various Ayers guides in the future, but this is an interesting snapshot.

By John Jackson Miller on 7/28/2008 9:53 PM

More data coming online, in the form of my analyses for the last third of 1996.

In 1996, comics sales to comics shops were mostly handled by three different major distributors: Diamond Comics Distributors, which was the exclusive comics-shop reseller of DC, Image, Dark Horse, and Acclaim comics; Heroes World Distribution, which was the distributor of Marvel comics; and Capital City Distribution, which sold miscellaneous other publishers until its acquisition by Diamond in July. In September 1996, with the market down to two distributors, I began a monthly tracking merging data from Heroes World with Diamond's reported figures.

As the reader will see (presuming I have all the links set up right), this coincided with the beginning of "Heroes Reborn," Marvel's short-lived experiment giving four of its titles to Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld to produce. This period also includes the wedding of Superman, another strong seller.

This is the first monthly distributor data onsite from before 2003, which means that it is all preorder data. As such, it means there are many comics in the listings that did not come out in the months listed. Some had their orders cancelled, so the totals overstate sales by that amount. Meanwhile, the listings also do not include reorders in this era, which means sales are underestimated by a degree. Finally, neither Marvel nor Diamond reported indexed trade paperback sales, although Diamond did provide ratios for its various proiduct areas, from which I've been able to figure minimum values for trade sales. Regard those calculations with a larger grain of salt than the later ones — but they're what we have.

More distributor data will be added in the coming weeks, filling in the gap in both directions. Stay tuned!

By John Jackson Miller on 7/25/2008 1:34 PM

Here's part of a talk I had with Tom Spurgeon of ComicsReporter about comics and recessions. Some of this is stuff I've said elsewhere, but I think the general theory is true — we need to look at front-market and back-market separately, and then you need to look at how the structure of the comics market at any given time either exposes or protects the field from external forces.

Tom is a little surprised I consider the back-market in these discussions, but I think the scale of it is such that it shouldn't be overlooked. I did some figuring a few years ago, using eBay volume and some guesswork, which found it in the low single-digit hundreds of millions, comparable with what Diamond was selling that year. I no longer track back-issue sales to the degree I once had (where I used to track everything when writing my own price guide, as an Overstreet advisor I tend to focus on my specialty area, numeric supply), but I do still think it's a part of the comics economy that definitely impacts the frontmarket. Many of the dealers are the same people who sell new comics, and the health of the backmarket can also be a reflection of enthusiasm in the field.

Definitely check out ComicsReporter when you can — a great resource to have.

 

By John Jackson Miller on 7/21/2008 1:39 PM

Updated! As I surmised last month, June 2008 comics sales in the direct market had an easier time in comparison with June 2007 sales, in part thanks to the second best trade paperback month recorded among Diamond’s Top 100 Trade Paperbacks. While ground was still lost in the narrower categories (such as Top 300 comics units and dollars, down 4% and 3% respectively), the Trade Paperback and wider categories saw increases year-over-year. Overall June 2008 orders were up 5% to nearly $37 million, with Diamond's Top 25 trades up 25% to just over $6 million.

The result is that all categories are still even or slightly off for the second quarter and for the year, but the margins are such that they could be made up in the second half of the year if the market performs even slightly better than it did in the second half of 2007. The overall total (the sum of all Diamond comics, trade paperback, and magazine orders, including items not on the top-sellers charts) is at $208.8 million, just under last year's first half mark of $210.11 million. Diamond's top-selling trade paperbacks category is the only one that's up  — by about $30,000. Diamond sold about 2.6 million fewer comic books in its Top 300 in the first half of 2008 versus the first half of 2007; that's the category with the most ground to make up.

There were four titles above 100,000 copies in estimated sales; perhaps the bigger help to June making up ground was the three trade paperbacks with orders over 10,000 copies.

TOP 300 COMICS UNIT SALES
June 2008: 6.66 million copies
Versus 1 year ago this month: -4%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +20%
Versus 10 years ago this month: -8%
Q2 2008: 20.43 million copies, -6% vs. Q2 2007
YEAR TO DATE:  39.54 million copies, -6% vs. 2007

TOP 300 COMICS DOLLAR SALES
June 2008: $21.37 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: -3%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +32%
Versus 10 years ago this month: +19%
Q2 2008: $65.94 million, -4% vs. Q2 2007
YEAR TO DATE: $125.73 million, -5% vs. 2007

TOP 100 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES
June 2008: $6.06 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: +25%
Versus 5 years ago this month, just the Top 50 vs. the Top 50: +86%
Versus 10 years ago this month, just the Top 25 vs. the Top 25: +155%
Q2 2008: $15.5 million, -3% vs. Q2 2007
YEAR TO DATE: $27.97 million, +0.1% vs. 2007

TOP 300 COMICS + TOP 100 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES
June 2008: $27.43 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: +2%
Versus 5 years ago this month, counting just the Top 50 TPBs: +39%
Versus 10 years ago this month, counting just the Top 25 TPBs: +27%
Q2 2008: $81.8 million, -3% vs. Q2 2007
YEAR TO DATE: $154.06 million, -4% vs. 2007

OVERALL DIAMOND SALES (including all comics, trades, and magazines)
June 2008: ... Read More »

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The ComiChron

By John Jackson Miller on 7/21/2008 1:09 PM

The June 2008 data is out from Diamond Comic Distributors. The Market Shares are below; check here for historical market shares both recently and back to 1998. More to come...

DIAMOND REPORTED DOLLAR SHARES
Marvel • 41.74%
DC • 29.45%
Dark Horse • 7.52%
Image • 4.30%
IDW • 3.10%
Viz • 1.47%
Dynamic • 1.30%
Tokyopop • 1.26%
Wizard • 0.92%
Digital Manga • 0.54%
Avatar • 0.46%
Random House • 0.41%
Udon • 0.36%
Gemstone • 0.34%
Devils Due • 0.31%
Archie • 0.31%
Fantagraphics • 0.28%
Boom • 0.27%
Zenescope • 0.27%
Virgin • 0.25%
Other • 5.14%

DIAMOND REPORTED UNIT SHARES
Marvel • 48.39%
DC • 29.56%
Dark Horse • 5.42%
Other • 3.58%
IDW • 3.28%
Image • 3.08%
Dynamic • 1.67%
Viz • 0.79%
Wizard • 0.72%
Avatar • 0.63%
Tokyopop • 0.54%
Zenescope • 0.43%
Archie • 0.42%
Virgin • 0.28%
Devils Due • 0.27%
Boom • 0.27%
Digital Manga • 0.20%
Gemstone • 0.17%
Random House • 0.15%
Fantagraphics • 0.08%
Udon • 0.07%
Other • 3.58%