January 2021 Comic Book Sales to Comics Shops

Estimated Comics Shipped to North American Comics Shops

This data combines orders from all Direct Market distributors. Click to see only Diamond and DC's distributor.

Back in January 1995, Marvel replaced all its X-Men titles temporarily for several months with the "Age of Apocalypse" versions of those series. Exactly 26 years later, DC did the same thing, except with almost its entire line in an event called "Future State" — and it paid dividends in giving the publisher the top comic books by initial-order units and dollars accoding to our retailer order sample.

Initial orders for all publishers (including DC) appear to have been around 6 million copies, for a value of between $27 million and $28 million. That compares favorably with the same grouping from January 2020, which had one additional shipping week and the advantage of a much larger slate of comics: 490 versus 270 in January 2021. DC's output was just 42 new comics, the lowest for a non-shutdown month since December 1990.

Our retail order dataset found Dark Nights Death Metal #7, the finale issue of that miniseries, as the top comic book in retail initial orders. Meanwhile, Future State: The Next Batman #1, priced at $7.99, appears to have been the top comic book in initial order dollars.

Marvel's top comic book was Star Wars: The High Republic #1, tying in with a new milieu for the franchise, and initial orders had been reported as topping 100,000 copies, with reorders and reprints taking it well beyond that. Our sample only looks at initial orders, so those wouldn't impact the rankings, which still had Death Metal a bit ahead.

Lunar did not release any sales reporting, and by late February, Diamond was in the third month of its second pause in monthly report releases. As we did during the first pause in 2020, Comichron has drawn upon a retailer initial order sample to determine approximate unit and dollar sales rankings. The dataset represented a sizable number of copies, from which Comichron was able to determine relative sales volumes — but only the rankings are being shared at this time, and no attempt has been made to rank items beyond 200th place.

No statistical adjustments have been made for returnability and no later returns have been subtracted out. Note, further, that our process only looks at first-month orders for comics, so no reordered titles from the month before or reprints appear in the chart below.

The charts feature every new comic book released by Diamond and Lunar in January 2021. Variant editions have been merged into single entries, following longtime industry practice. The DC release dates are from Lunar.

Things to remember: As we're not characterizing order levels at this time, ranked comics could be separated by thousands of copies or as little as a single issue. Rankings are most reliable for regular series issues in the middle of the chart: orders for the highest sellers and first issues may tend to show more variation.

Rankings in these charts should also be expected to differ — often significantly — from the sales-to-consumers charts available at other outlets. Those report sell-through and not sell-in. Comichron tracks copies in circulation, a category which includes both copies on retail shelves and in consumers' hands.

You can see the reorders that were placed during the month on our pages for reorders and advance reorders for the year. We also have a page breaking out ship dates for second printings.

As is the case with all data on Comichron, it is subject to revision without notice in the event more authoritative and complete information about orders becomes available.

—John Jackson Miller

This the two lists below include all comic books released by Direct Market Distributors in the month.
Rankings are based on Comichron's retailer inital order sample and do not include reorders.
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.

The list below includes all the other comics released by Diamond and Lunar for which Comichron is not projecting rankings at this time. They appear in alphabetical order by publisher and then by title; use the arrows to sort by any column.

The links lead to current listings for each item on eBay. You can also find the books at your comics shop.

January 2021 Graphic Novel Sales to Comics Shops

Comichron did not examine graphic novel orders, but you can see what graphic novels were receiving retail attention at Diamond in the month by looking at its reorders.