DC Comics Month-to-Month Sales: September 2009
11/6/09More “Blackest Night” and more Batman make September another good month for DC Comics’ periodical business. This year’s retelling of Superman’s origin doesn’t set the charts on fire, on the other hand, despite the big-ticket creative team of Geoff Johns and Gary Frank — maybe it’s time to retire the character. In other news, J. Michael Straczynski, who’s had some success recently writing the Hollywood film Changeling and Marvel’s Thor, was also meant to do something for DC in September, but I can’t seem to find it, so maybe … ah, hold it, there it is. My bad, I wasn’t scrolling fast enough.
Average DC sales remained relatively steady on balance, which for the publisher’s Vertigo and WildStorm imprints means that they sold around 10,000 units each of the comic books, give or take a few. (Vertigo: give a few; WildStorm: take a few.) Vertigo’s big periodical launch was Jeff Lemire’s post-ap-oddball-yptic Sweet Tooth, the latest new-series launch to retail for $ 1.00. At WildStorm’s comic-book department, the most noteworthy development is that they had four books below the 5K mark, two of which missed the Top 300 chart altogether. Reportedly, WildStorm’s made some lucrative wholesale deals with the video-game industry recently, to be fair, which would explain the continued existence of at least some of its titles.
See below for the analysis, and please consider the small print at the end of the column. Thanks to Milton Griepp and ICv2.com for the permission to use their figures. An overview of ICv2.com’s estimates can be found here.
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1 - BLACKEST NIGHT 07/2009: Blackest Night #1 of 8 — 177,105 [196,066] 08/2009: Blackest Night #2 of 8 — 146,092 (-17.5%) [155,512] 09/2009: Blackest Night #3 of 8 — 140,786 (- 3.6%)
Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis’ Blackest Night remains the best-selling comic in the North American direct market by about 30,000 units; the number-two book, Marvel’s Reborn #3, sold an estimated 108,331 units.
Blackest Night is levelling off very quickly for a high-profile miniseries, while reorders for previous issues also remain strong: Blackest Night #1 sold another 10,996 units in September, issue #2 another 9,420 and July’s Blackest Night: Tales of the Corps #2 also made the chart again, with an additional 4,098 copies — and there were more, see below.
As usual, I should point out that the book’s numbers — and especially the smooth drop-off — probably have a lot to do with the available variant-cover editions. For Blackest Night #1, there was a 1-for-250 edition, which means retailers needed to order 250 copies of the regular edition for every copy of the variant edition; for issue #2, there was a 1-for-200 edition; starting with #3, there are 1-for-100 editions for all remaining issues — also, all issues of Blackest Night are promoted with additional 1-for-25 variant-cover editions.
Still, even taking into account that there’s likely some distortion going on at the retail level thanks to the gimmick incentives, Blackest Night keeps performing very, very well.
(more…)
Two more stories on the continuing effects of Diamond’s tougher benchmarks:
As always, WATCHMEN and NARUTO 
