January 1992 Comic Book Sales to Comics Shops

Estimated Comics Preordered by North American Comics Shops
Based on Reports from Diamond Comic Distributors

Diamond Comic Distributors completed its tenth year of operations at the end of January 1992, a month that saw orders down by 10% from the month before, according to Diamond Dateline (Mar. 5, 1992), "due to retailers lack of confidence in the economy." But in retrospect, it was a pause, as the industry revved up for an even stronger year than the one before. In large measure, the reason for that growth came from something that was just starting: the first Image comic book would appear in the February charts.

Diamond had 396 employees in 23 locations by this point, including the United Kingdom; it also relaunched its Previews catalog with a new #1 beginning this month.

Quasar Special #1 was actually the Direct Market offering of a newsstand comic book that contained the contents of Quasar #32, also out this month. It was designed to allow newsstand readers to see the ending to "Operation Galactic Storm," since Quasar was a Direct-Market-only title.

The raw version of the chart below was published in Diamond Dialogue (January 1992). We've added ship dates. The dates shown below are the dates the comics were scheduled to have shipped from the printer, according to Diamond Previews (November 1991, for January 1992-shipping product).

Diamond reported almost all dates as Tuesdays, which corresponded to when the printer Ronald's released its comics — but World Color Press wasn't releasing its books until 12:01 a.m. on Thursdays, and Diamond's catalog seems to have grouped everything together under the earlier day, regardless of which printer a comic came from. (Capital's Advance Comics uniformly announced dates that were two days later. Its dates appeared in Comics Buyer's Guide and Comic Shop News.) We've adjusted the dates on the comics known to have come from World Color Press to Thursday. Specific on-sale dates were rarely announced in advance for smaller publishers' titles as they could seldom guarantee printer times.

In some cases, comics were delayed; where available, the correct later dates have been included from Diamond's Dateline and Capital City Distribution's New Weekly Releases newsletters.

Further, in this era, distributor catalog dates for all publishers did not synch up exactly with the calendar month, so Diamond's January charts included a week's worth of DC comics from February — and are missing the first week's DC comics, which appeared in Diamond's December charts. This would continue until March 1995, when DC would realign its solicitations with the Direct Market's calendar month (that chart only included three weeks of DC sales). Because Diamond did not report indexed sales, there is no way to know where those comics would have landed in this month's chart.

This was the last month that Diamond would report only its Top 100 comics; in February, it shifted to reporting the Top 250 (in part to catch up with Capital City Distribution, which had run much longer lists for years). Because Diamond in February also noted for each item how their rankings had changed from January, we were able to reverse-engineer where 82 additional comics after 100th place should have gone. January was also the last month that Diamond didn't include order index numbers; they would begin in February 1992, allowing estimated sales to be computed and making years of Comichron's work possible.

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

—John Jackson Miller

This list includes all items on Diamond's Top 100 chart, plus items whose ranks were suggested by the rank-change data in the following month's chart.
Click to read the methodology for this table's estimates.
Distributor charts are regional commodity reports, not measures of a work's total reach. Read our FAQ.
The links lead to current listings for each item on eBay. You can also find the books at your comics shop.

January 1992 Graphic Novel Sales to Comics Shops

Estimated Graphic Novels and Trade Paperbacks Preordered by North American Comics Shops Based on Reports from Diamond Comic Distributors

This list includes all items on Diamond's Top Graphic Novel charts. If you don't see a book, Diamond released no data for it.

The links lead to title details on Amazon (paid links). You can also find the books at your comics shop.

Diamond's graphic novel charts continued to be a catchall for graphic novels as well as higher-priced comic books — but the category entered 1992 as Diamond's third largest, representing 8% of all dollar sales. Todd McFarlane's Spider-Man: Torment trade paperback made the top four.