Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: Comics, dc, diamond, marvel

Did The DC Comics Relaunch Boost Marvel's Sales?

Every month ICV2 take Diamond's comparative sales figures and try to plug some actual numbers in, and extrapolate sales figures for the whole line.

They have just released their figures for the month of September, including the DC Relaunch, and there are a few points to make.

Now DC have stated that Batman and Action Comics both sold over 200,000 and that Aquaman, Batgirl, Batman And Robin, The Dark Knight, Detective Comics, The Flash, Green Lantern and Superman all sold over 100,000.

It's been observed that Diamond Comic Distributors have reduced reported figures by anything from 10 to 20%, as a number of the DC books were made returnable. but that doesn't apply to Batman, Action Comics, Green Lantern and Flash. This is how that chart may look if the books in question all sold out in the stores and Diamond under-reported by 20%.

The big missing factor her is the United Kingdom. Their orders, and anything that comes through Diamond UK, are not reported in these figures, often estimated to make up 10-20% of orders.

But you'll need a 20% Diamond uptick and a 20% UK uptick to push Aquaman over the 100,000 orders that DC reported. Which should also have lifted Green Lantern Corps into that plus-100,000 selling group – however DC haven't mentioned that.

But aside from DC, if these numbers, if not accurate, are consistently comparable from month to month, then something else has happened here. Fear Itself #5 has reported orders of around 91,000. Fear Itself #6 has 93,000. Amazing Spider-Man #669 was 57,000, but #670 is now 58,000. Avengers #16 was 60,000 but  #17 is now 61,500. FF #8 was 52,000, FF #9 is 53,000. Not only have the sales of competitors not collapsed as some predicted, but they seem to have prospered.

DC Comics clearly aimed much of their marketing at lapsed customers, getting them to come back to the comic store. Looks like they succeeded – and a rising tide lifted all ships…

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