October 2021 Comic Book Sales to Comics Shops by Diamond

Estimated Comics Shipped to North American Comics Shops
Based on Reports from Diamond Comic Distributors

This data refers to sales by Diamond. Click to see those from the Overall market.

A new era began for Diamond Comic Distributors on the first of October as Penguin Random House became the new sales agent for Marvel. Diamond continued to offer Marvel products as as a wholesaler, but its sales reported below accounted only for a little over a third of the overall total.

Diamond nonetheless had two comic books selling more than a third of a million copies. House of Slaughter #1 from Boom sold 480,769 copies across all editions by year-end, becoming the top seller for the year by a tiny margin. Gunslinger Spawn #1 from Image placed second with nearly 340,000 copies sold by year-end.

Diamond has not yet released an October sales chart, due to the ransomware attack which impacted many of its systems in November. In the meantime, the chart below is constructed from Diamond's end-of-year final sales list, examining only the comics that came out in October. It includes later reorders, so it's not exactly like a reguar Diamond chart.

The top Marvel issue, Amazing Spider-Man #75, placed sixth at Diamond with 52,421 copies shipped. That puts its total overall sales likely around 145,000 copies, once Penguin Random House is included. That would have put it in third place at Diamond.

Reverse-engineering alert: What appears below is different from a usual monthly sales chart. It is all of the October-shipping titles that made Diamond's end-of-year Top 4000 list. It includes any initial sales of those titles, but also any reorders from November and December. There is no way to separate them from the initial sales.

It's also possible that some new October comics did not make the Top 4000 for the year, but given that the bottom of the chart was in the 600-copy range, that's unlikely to impact many items.

"Marvel PRH" is coded below as a reminder that around 65% of the sales of its titles came from Penguin Random House; tripling the Marvel sales below gives a good rough estimate for overall sales. Diamond was also not the exclusive distributor this month for Scout and Ahoy, several of whose titles had sales through Lunar Distribution, but Diamond is likely to have retained most of the volume for those publishers.

Click to skip to the Top Graphic Novels for the month. And you can see the reorders that were placed during the month on our pages for reorders and advance reorders for the year.

—John Jackson Miller

This list includes all new items for the month that appeared on Diamond's end-of-year chart.
Diamond only accounts for about 36% of sales of items marked with Marvel PRH.
When there are versions of an issue with different cover prices, Diamond lists them in seprate entries.
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.

October 2021 Graphic Novel Sales to Comics Shops

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

The titles below appeared in Diamond's end-of-year list and had release dates in our records from this month. It does not include sales for any older titles.

This list includes all items released new this month that appeared on Diamond's end-of-year chart.
The links lead to title details on Amazon (paid links). You can also find the books at your comics shop.