Interesting Comics Analysis - October 2005

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Infinite Crisis leads DC to a big win. Helped by the estimated 249,100 copies of Infinite Crisis #1 ordered by retailers, DC managed a rare feat, leading Marvel in every single category calculated by CBG: Top 300 Comics units, Top 300 Comics dollars, Top 300 Comics plus Top 100 Trades, and the Overall category, which includes backlist trades and comics not in the Top 300.

 

While it came close in May of this year, DC last led Marvel in all calculations in August 2000. Observers will note that there aren't many high-profile DC products in that month's listing - but where it surpassed Marvel was in volume of releases.

 

"In August 2000, DC placed fully twice as many comics in Diamond's Top 300 as Marvel did, 98 to 49," Miller said. "This was right at the end of the comics recession and preceded the increase in Marvel's number of offerings." By contrast, in October 2005, DC ranked 91 items to Marvel's 78. Since Marvel has often been able to outsell DC in units despite having fewer offerings, this change suggests that DC is digging into Marvel's per-title performance advantage.

 

However, he said those figures can be hard to interpret. "When it comes to computing per-title sales averages for publishers - comics' version of baseball's 'slugging percentage' - it's necessary to drop out reprints, reordered titles that make it into the Top 300 a second of third time, variant covers and other things that might be oranges to the apples of titles receiving initial orders." Doing that, DC appears to have had 80 first-time items in October, averaging 32,000 copies each, where Marvel had 69 first-time offerings averaging 36,700 copies each.

 

"It does suggest the old axiom of the random Marvel selling one-and-a-half times the copies of the random DC is no longer accurate, now that Marvel's line has grown to include kids' titles and subgenres that aren't necessarily at the top of the charts," he said. "On the other hand, it's the presence of that new material that's helped make the difference between the recession of 2000 and the recovery of 2005."

 

2006 Market Analysis - CBG and Newsarama