By John Jackson Miller on 3/21/2008 8:25 AM

The new Overstreet Price Guide is out,  the first with yours truly as an Overstreet advisor — previously I'd worked exclusively for the competition. (Maggie Thompson is in the Overstreet group as well now — things change). My first contribution is a feature on Star Wars comics history, getting a bit into the scope and differentiated manner of its circulation in the 1970s.

It gets further into the copies that Western Publishing commissioned — the so-called "Whitman variants," which is an a propos term despite the fact that the Whitman logo does not appear on the comics themselves. As illustrated in my piece in Comics Buyer's Guide #1609, while these "fat diamond" copies of Marvel comics may at some point have been sold to direct market stores, the existence of this printing seems to spring strictly from Western/Whitman, as evidenced by the fact that the whole Marvel line was dumped by Whitman in late 1977 while they were printing more Star Wars reprints!

Fun stuff, and Overstreet is required reading in any event!

By John Jackson Miller on 3/19/2008 10:44 AM

My Newsarama feature for the month appears here (with lots of cool historical comparatives), and the charts and graphs here are updated, as well. X-Force #1 led the top-selling comics list in February:

TOP 300 COMICS UNIT SALES
February 2008: 6.26 million copies
Versus 1 year ago this month: -5%
Versus 5 years ago this month:+7%
Versus 10 years ago this month: -5%
YEAR TO DATE: 13.02 million copies, -2% vs. 2007

TOP 300 COMICS DOLLAR SALES
February 2008: $19.62 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: -6%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +19%
Versus 10 years ago this month: +25%
YEAR TO DATE: $40.65 million, -3% vs. 2007

TOP 100 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES
February 2008: $4.01 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: +7%
Versus 5 years ago this month, just the Top 50 vs. the Top 50: +13%
YEAR TO DATE: $8.14 million, +5% vs. 2007

TOP 300 COMICS + TOP 100 TRADE PAPERBACK DOLLAR SALES
February 2008: $23.63 million
Versus 1 year ago this month: -4%
Versus 5 years ago this month, just the Top 50 TPBs: +18%
YEAR TO DATE: $48.76, -1% vs. 2007

OVERALL DIAMOND SALES (including all comics, trades, and magazines)
February 2008: $32.53 million ($36.85 million with UK)
Versus 1 year ago this month: +1%
Versus 5 years ago this month: +48%
YEAR TO DATE: $67.09 million, +2% vs. 2007

The year-to-date figures are also available from anywhere on the site, on the Comichrometer at upper left.

As you can see, we are only up year- ... Read More »

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By John Jackson Miller on 3/18/2008 10:07 AM

Linkworthy: This resource on sales figures for the many weekly British comics series. A lot of stuff I hadn't seen before, and definitely worth a look!

By John Jackson Miller on 3/17/2008 11:10 AM

The preliminary Diamond sales rankings for February 2008 are now online at Newsarama; the top 10 run like this...

1) X-Force #1
2) New Avengers #38
3) Amazing Spider-Man #549
4) Thor #6
5) Ultimates 3 #3
6) All Star Batman & Robin Boy Wonder #9
7) Hulk #2
8) Fantastic Four #554
9) Amazing Spider-Man #550
10) Uncanny X-Men #495

The Recent Market Shares chart here on the site has been updated; the full analysis will follow as it is generated. Watch this space!

 

By John Jackson Miller on 3/14/2008 8:50 AM

I have been meaning to update the Frequently Asked Questions section of the website — quite a list has developed — but one of the most frequently Frequently Asked Questions relates to whether movies based on comic books help sell comic books.

My personal theory on this first appeared in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1598 (Nov 2004); you can see some of the responses and alternate theories it generated here:

The simplest way to put it is that movies have historically helped comics sales in comics shops — except when they didn’t. A frustrating answer, but it fits the facts. Digging deeper, we can refine that answer a bit to explain why some movies help and others don’t. In my observations, cinematic cross-over sales into comics shops are a function of:

• how well the movie does;

• how recognizable the character is as a comics character;

• how widely available the related merchandise is when the movie comes out; and

• how much cash comics retailers have on hand.

A few cases:

Case #1: Batman (1989). Many people, including most comics fans, were skeptical of this movie before it came out; Beetlejuice didn’t say “Bruce Wayne” to most people. To a degree, Madison Avenue had withheld judgment, too — the result being fewer licensed products on sale in advance of the film in mainstream stores.

There were some, to be sure, but for a brief, shining week or so, you could walk by Spencer’s Gifts without seeing Bat-everything — and past there to the comics shop, which had loads of Batman goodies from over the years. Comics shops had the most Batman-related product available to meet the interest in that second half of June — and sales reflected that.

A recovery was already underway that summer, following the previous black-and-white collapse — and leading up to the giant bubble market of the early 1990s. But the added attention surely helped the Batman comics franchise, which reeled off a series of hits in the second half of the year.

By contrast, when Case #2: Batman Returns (1992) came out, all the mainstream outlets had already been hip-deep in Bat-memorabilia since the month after the first film came out. Warner had a first-tier fast-food licensee this time around in McDonald’s; with the first film, it had been Taco Bell.

The result of this saturation was that comics retailers said it didn’t contribute much to their already stellar years, despite its decent box-office. Retailers’ share of its success was smaller. (By this time, too, the comics market boom was at an intensity where any contribution from outside would have been harder to notice.)

Case #3, Men in Black (1997), demonstrated that when the mainstream audience doesn’t know characters are from comics, there’s no bounce whatsoever for the hobby. Many hardly remembered Men in Black was from comics — and Marvel itself barely put out a couple of comic books to capitalize on it. In the declining market of that year, any blip would have been noticeable: none was.

Case #4, X-Men (2000), might have involved a little of this effect, since the fact that Uncanny X-Men had been the top-selling comic book for nearly two decades was news to the general public. But the bigger problem was that comics shops were at the end of a sev ... Read More »

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