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Bleeding Cool Bestseller List – 16th November 2017 – "Doomsday Clock Destroyed Every Other Comic On The Shelf"

Published Sun, 26 Nov 2017 09:00:57 -0600

This is the Top 10 Bleeding Cool Bestseller List, as compiled by a number of comic stores from their sales on Wednesday and Thursday. It measures what are known as the "Wednesday Warriors", those who can't wait to the weekend to get this week's comics. We salute you, and the keenness you bring to your passion.

It's a slam dunk. Every retailer reported Doomsday Clock #1 as their best-selling title of the week. Most followed by Detective Comics, Action Comics and Flash but, again, Black Panther seems to be making real inroads in many comic stores and may be the success that Marvel Legacy needed…

Doomsday Clock #1
Detective Comics #969
Action Comics #992
Flash #35
Black Panther #167
Wonder Woman #35
X-Men Gold #16
Justice League Of America #19
Star Wars #39
Invincible Iron Man #594

Thanks to the following retailers,

Rodman Comics of Ankeny, IA
Ssalefish Comics of Winston-Salem & Greensboro, NC
Famous Faces & Funnies of West Melbourne, FL
Comix Experience, San Francisco, CA
Comix Experience Outpost, San Francisco, CA
Fat Jack's Comicrypt of Philadelphia, PA
Dr. No's Comics & Games Superstore of Marietta, GA
G-Mart Comic Books, Champaign, IL
Velocity Comics – Richmond, VA
Big Planet Comics – 4 stores in the Washington DC area

And here's what they had to say

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In the first Metal-less week of comics, Doomsday Clock absolutely DESTROYED every other book on the shelf. We sold well over 100 copies in just two days making it one of our best selling books in that short of a time period. We almost sold 100 on day one alone. On the other side of the aisle, FFF darling, Donny Cates made the Top Ten twice this week with Thanos at #4 (the highest selling Marvel book we've had for a while) and Redneck at #9. X-Men Gold also managed to place in the Top Ten at #8 which is a surprise to be sure, but a welcome one. The X-Men are finally getting the attention the title deserves as Marvel seemed to suddenly remember that people like those characters and are willing to buy their books if they have well written and interesting stories. They're not perfect, or as prolific as they once were, but Guggenheim is working on it and he's going in the right direction. Of course, they also got outsold by an alt-earth dystopic future Nightwing miniseries. And of course, Batman Who Laughs won't let Metal leave a week un-Metal-ized as it manages to take the #10 spot in it's second week.

Sherlock Frankenstein, the Black Hammer spin-off from Dark Horse is the only indie book besides Redneck to make the Top Ten. Black Hammer isn't a huge seller, so it's a little odd to see the spin-off book sell better than average. I wish some of these new Image and Dark Horse and other small publishers were selling better. They all seem to be getting a good buzz, but that just doesn't translate to numbers. Sure there's the rare Realm or Baby Teeth, but it's hard to gauge how well a book is going to do before it gets to the shelf.

Invincible Iron Man, Punisher Platoon, and Generation X all sold well enough to make the Top Twenty. People like Garth Ennis on Punisher and it's no shock to see it sell better than the Legacy series. As for Invincible Iron Man and Generation X, it's great to see them start to sell more, but it's still a little funny that they're both being outsold by Suicide Squad. Runaways TPBs are getting some extra attention with the first few episodes of the show being well received. We enjoyed the first few episodes and think it's off to a great start.

—–

What to really say about this week? Marvel didn't have many heavy hitter titles out this week, though I'm not sure what qualifies anymore. The list reflects this with 2 MU books, Iron Man and X-Men: Gold taking #s 6 and 7 with a licensed sci-fi book being their highest charter at #3. Expected DC books make up most of the list. Nothing outside of the BigTwo with a nice showing by Astro City at #8. Wonder Woman has been shedding readers consistently since Rucka left but still managed to squeak in at #9 with Teen Titans right behind it. A sequel to some 80's book was #1 — selling about 5 times the copies of our #2 book. Biggest disappointment of the week: we sold zero copies of Black Panther off the shelf. Zero.

—–

Doomsday Clock above all others, especially the Gary Frank variant with Superman and Doctor Manhattan. We had a huge turnout for the midnight release of the book and it has been trucking hard all week. Chances are we may be sold out by next week despite going huge on numbers. Thanos deserves mention for cresting the top ten for the first time since maybe the beginning. The cool Secret Wars homage cover helped and Donny Cates writing it has given it the boost it needed, despite always having been a cool book. We are two weeks away from Donny Cates doing a signing with us and we are very excited. Everyone who read God Country has already said they'll give anything he writes a chance.

—–

If we had broken up Doomsday Clock by covers, it would've ranked #1, 2, 3 and 5. The biggest book of the year didn't disappoint in terms of getting lots of people through the door. Thanos would've charted higher if we'd ordered more… we predict Donny Cates will be the hottest writer at Marvel within the next few months. Otherwise everything went as expected this week.

—–

Thanksgiving made it a crazy week. Having regulars out of town with new people visiting. Doomsday Clock took the top spot of course. Marvel is lucky to have the Star Wars license. It is the only book from Marvel this week to make it into the top ten. XO Manowar managed to sneak in again for Valiant. The rest was all DC titles.

—–

We sold 3 times more Doomsday Clock than any other book this week. It was a shorted and slower week so that probably contributed to 3 Marvel books making it into the top 5 and Batman Who Laughs coming in at number 10. I am very much looking forward to seeing how Doomsday Clock does over the next 5 weeks. It might be our best selling book of the year.

—–

Doomsday Clock #1 was our top seller this week, something I'm sure we have in common with every other comic book seller in the country! Altogether, including all 4 covers, we sold 4 times as many Doomsday Clock issues than we did of our next bestselling issue, X-Men Gold #16. The lenticular Rorschach cover alone sold about double X-Men Gold. That disparity represents our sales pretty well this week: Doomsday Clock flew off the shelves and pretty much everything else did kinda meh.

—–

As I imagine will be the case for a great majority of retailers this week, our best seller was Geoff Johns and Gary Frank's DOOMSDAY CLOCK #1 – the much hyped "sequel to Watchmen". It sold so well, in fact, that it makes the rest of our list feel a bit like an afterthought. There are still some interesting items to note, however. The dominance of Batman on our week to week sales abates quite a bit here, though DETECTIVE COMICS #969 is still present in the top half of the list. BLACK PANTHER #167 maintains that title's steady sales, and Rebirth-era Superman (who's overall sales performance remains *vastly* improved over the New 52 era) continues steadily towards his industry landmark with ACTION COMICS #992. WONDER WOMAN #35 sits comfortably in the middle of the pack, while the bottom half of the list gives us several showings from Marvel with the likes of CABLE #151 and AMAZING SPIDER-MAN RENEW YOUR VOWS #13.

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If we had counted each cover as a separate item, Doomsday Clock #1 would have taken the top four places in our store's sales chart, Detective would have taken fifth and seventh place, and Action would have taken sixth and eighth place. DC outsold Marvel more than 6:1 today in our store, with the best-selling Marvel title (Star Wars #39) only making it to fourteenth place. Marvel's sales situation is approaching disastrous: readers have now tired of Marvel's over-dependence on variants and are rejecting all of them, the core titles are down significantly, and our most recent Marvel orders have reached previously-unseen proportionate lows. If Marvel isn't going into crisis mode right now, they're making a major mistake: never before has a comics company fallen out of favor so precipitously and so suddenly.

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