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DC Comics Trounces Marvel on Marketshare-Per Capita in May 2019 – Antarctic and Albatross Performing Strong

We're totally doing this every month now. A Marketshare-Per-Capita chart. The usual comics industry marketshare shows how much share of the overall market a comics publisher has. This divides it by the number of titles they publish in that month.

We've already looked at publisher marketshare in the North American direct market of comic book shops for May 2019,. And we just ran the top 500 ordered comics and graphic novels for the month.

But if you divide the marketshare by the number of individual titles published that month, you get a different picture. In May, Marvel published 154 comics, graphic novels to DC's 93 and Image's 61.

DCeased #1, Most-Ordered Comic in May (If You Don't Count Year Of The Villain), as DC Closes Gap on Marvel Marketshare

DC Comics soundly beats Marvel.

Now, in January, Marvel still beat DC on both counts, in February, DC had a greater retailer marketshare per item distributed than Marvel, though brought in less revenue and in March, DC Comics dominated both, more in sales than revenue. In April, Marvel swung this round again, leading DC over marketshare per capita both in dollars raised and items sold. But in May, DC swung that around, taking a dramatic lead in both.

What flavour Albatross?

Dynamite outperformed into fifth place behind Dark Horse. And Albatross Funnybooks, publishers of Eric Powell's titles, are getting good orders even if they only have a few titles, and so have a better performance-per-book than Premiere publisher Boom Studios. And Antarctic Press rose to beat both Oni Press and Valiant on this measure. It is worth still mentioning that this also includes Marvel's dollar line of True Believers reprints adding to the numbers of titles published which can skew numbers a bit.

I hope this, as ever, is a conversation point.

Publisher Retail Marketshare Per Capita x1000 Dollar Marketshare Per Capita x1000
DC COMICS 303 415
MARVEL COMICS 263 258
IMAGE COMICS 112 90
DARK HORSE 73 42
DYNAMITE 77 65
IDW PUBLISHING 66 54
ALBATROSS FUNNYBOOKS 66 46
BOOM! STUDIOS 63 50
ANTARCTIC PRESS 62 44
ONI PRESS 60 40
VALIANT 52 59
AFTERSHOCK COMICS 49 49
ACTION LAB ENTERTAINMENT 42 35
VIZ MEDIA 41 14
TITAN COMICS 37 27
ARCHIE COMICS 35 31

And here are the full stats for comparison…


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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