First published at 19:28 UTC on June 11th, 2019.
May's orders of comic books and graphic novels in the comics shop market were higher than in any month since the previous October, but not quite good enough to beat May 2018, which had Amazing Spider-Man #800 among other blockbusters in the mix…
MORE
May's orders of comic books and graphic novels in the comics shop market were higher than in any month since the previous October, but not quite good enough to beat May 2018, which had Amazing Spider-Man #800 among other blockbusters in the mix. Retailers ordered almost exactly $47 million in comic books and graphic novels from Diamond Comic Distributors, including 7.27 million comic books; both those figures were down 4% year-over-year versus the previous May, and the year-to-date total slipped slightly into the red for the first time in 2019.
DC's DCeased #1 led new comics periodicals with more than 242,000 copies sold to retailers, making it the year's second-best seller to that point. DC took four of the top five slots on the charts and saw its sales to retailers increase 5% in dollar terms, despite shipping 14 fewer comics than it did in the same month in 2018.
DC's 25-cent Year of the Villain #1 was counted toward its unit market share, which is part of why the unit gap between DC and Marvel was narrow; the market share tables appear to been calculated based on a data set that included as many as a million copies that do not appear in the regular comics charts; the DC issue likely accounts for most of them.
Marvel shipped 118 new comic books to market, an increase of 26 comics over May 2018 and a figure higher than any since Diamond began reporting monthly release counts in 2013. (Second and later printings are not counted as new titles, but $1 reprints like the True Believers books are counted as new and distinct publications. Variants are only counted separately if they're at a different price point as the "regular" version.) While the number of new comics Marvel shipped was likely higher than any in the 21st Century to date, it wasn't an all-time record, as at the peak of the early 1990s comics boom, Marvel shipped 126 new comic books to retailers in August 1993.
Image, meanwhile, cut its offerings even more than DC did versus the previous May, releas..
LESS