1989 Comic Book Sales to Comics Shops

Estimated Comics Shipped to North American Comics Shops
Based on Reports from Direct Market Distributors

1989 saw the early 1990s comics boom get fully underway as, recovering from the distributor failures of the end of the black-and-white boom, the Direct Market moved to fully embrace the 1989 Batman movie by Tim Burton and the attendant Batmania.

Neither Diamond Comic Distributors nor Capital City Distribution released end-of-year summations of their bestsellers, but there's no doubt that Legends of the Dark Knight #1 from DC was the top-selling comic book of the year. The first new Batman series in decades had preorders so high that its shipments had to be broken up across multiple weeks, and DC rushed to put different-colored covers on each week's issue to help retailers attract attention to them. The move is credited — or blamed — with inadvertently launching the variant-cover craze. Capital City's orders suggest that Batman #442, the debut of Tim Drake as Robin, would have been in third place for the year.

The charts below show the known top-sellers from every month in 1989 — with links to the full chart pages currently available on Comichron. No Diamond chart for February 1989 has yet been located. The month was also skipped in Comics Values Monthly, which reprinted the Diamond charts. Uncanny X-Men #245 was the top seller at Capital City and likely held the same rank at Diamond.

Only three differences appear to exist between the top-ranked books at Diamond and Capital. Capital found Batman #433 to be the top seller in March 1989, versus Uncanny X-Men #246 at Diamond; it happened again with the same titles two months later. And in June 1989 Batman #436 was Capital's top seller; it was the other issue from the series that month, Batman #437, at Diamond.

Click to skip to the Top Graphic Novels for the month.

—John Jackson Miller

DIAMOND TOP SELLERS BY MONTH

Listed are all the top sellers for each month at Diamond.
Where months are linked, click to see the full Diamond chart for that month.
Distributor charts are regional commodity reports, not measures of a work's total reach. Read our FAQ.
The title links lead to current listings for each item on eBay. You can also find the books at your comics shop.

CAPITAL CITY TOP SELLERS BY MONTH

Listed are all the top sellers for each month at Capital City.
Where months are linked, click to see the full Capital chart for that month.
Est. units are the number of copies preordered just from Capital, Overall totals would be much higher.
Distributor charts are regional commodity reports, not measures of a work's total reach. Read our FAQ.
The title links lead to current listings for each item on eBay. You can also find the books at your comics shop.

My analyses of preorders from Diamond Comic Distributors for individual months (where available) can be found here:

My analyses of preorders from Capital City Distribution for individual months (where available) can be found here: