FAQ: The end of comics circulation data

Why there haven't been any new comics sales charts from distributors since 2022

by John Jackson Miller

Many people who've visited Comichron before are likely to have seen the monthly sales charts from comics distributors, which started in October 1984 (as seen in the graphic below). You can read more about their history and why they were originally made public here, but a frequent question in recent years, also covered on that page, is this one...

Q: What happened to the new comics charts?

A: The chart data in the 2000s all came from Diamond Comic Distributors, which was handling sales of almost all comic books to comics shops in North America. It reported its sales to retailers regularly for more than 30 years, until the Coronavirus pandemic forced the company to temporarily suspend operations after the March 2020 chart release.

When Diamond returned to business, the charts took months to begin again because during the shutdown, DC comics switched its distribution to two upstart distributors, of which Lunar Distribution is the only survivor. The loss of so much volume, combined with the fact that many stores' operations had been curtailed during the early months of the pandemic, meant that when Diamond returned to press with its charts, they omitted any information allowing observers (like Comichron) to estimate the number of copies retailers purchased.

This was far less useful information for retailers and collectors, but we continued to publish the reports — and for a time attempted to estimate what those underlying figures were based on other information. But Diamond's reporting became erratic. A ransomware attack brought all operations and reporting to a halt for several months, and while Diamond did return some data to its charts in the summer of 2021, the departure of Marvel to Penguin Random House for distribution. Penguin didn't publish any sales data at all, leaving only Diamond.

Diamond soldiered on with sales charts on its remaining publishers until April 2022, when its share of the market was so small it was no longer useful for it to publish. For the three years until its 2025 bankruptcy, we ran their reorder charts, which had some rankings but no copy counts; that was for the sake of completion. While there are still some earlier charts from Diamond and other distibutors we have yet to publish, the era of transparency about sales to retailers ended in 2022.

Q: Why haven't publishers and the new distributors wanted to share the same information Diamond did?

A: We and many others certainly asked, but the simple fact is that the culture of statistical transparency in comics was, to a degree, a happy historical accident, borne of the interest of Capital City Distribution founder Milton Griepp in demonstrating to stores what new titles had become popular. The charts were on borrowed time for much of the 2010s, as more and more publishers were owned by large corporations that were less willing to have their operations fully open to public view.

In a media environment where even third parties like Bookscan and Billboard are paywalling their data, it should be no surprise that we know less about how many comics are in circulation than in the history of the business. That is not likely to change.

Q: What other resources are there?

A: Several parties over the years, including ones we've worked with, have compiled charts based on the number of copies retailers have sold to others. This "sell-through" information has several uses, but it is distinct from circulation, which is what Comichron specializes in: the total number of copies retailers purchased and which are on the market, impacting back-issue pricing. Detailed circulation data can be compared with relatively few caveats to historic data from sources from the 1930s to the 1980s, and as such is of greater utility to the historian.

I've worked with sell-through charts of my own for many years, including running them for more than a decade in Comics Retailer magazine — but we realized no matter how many stores' reports were included, the estimations would never be as accurate as the Diamond figures, which were known to the exact copy, and it was also measuring a different thing. I picked one to specialize in, but both measures have uses, and the utility of each changes over time. Sell-through is useful in the moment, to know when a title like Walking Dead has become popular at the register; knowing how many copies are circulating is useful to the collector and retailer forever.