This week, ICv2 published its monthly Top 50/ Top 200 lists from Comichron, ranking the most-sold comics for September 2023. The list is nothing new, and you can typically expect to see the list come out during the first week of the month, reporting on the preceding month.
Read the full report: https://icv2.com/articles/markets/view/55222/top-50-comics-september-2023
Up until the publishers started to split from Diamond during the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic, you could put a fair amount of faith in the numbers to tell you which titles were selling well, which sold poorly, and how certain titles fluctuated when publisher initiatives came into play – crossovers, events, guest creators, etc.
Now that Diamond is no longer the sole distributor, numbers are impossible to come by, leaving Comichron to guesstimate where things stand based on a LOT of assumptions. What are those assumptions?
- Comichron’s numbers assume a baseline of 100K issues sold for the main Batman comic.
- The report is an extrapolation of sales data from only 100 stores when the American brick-and-mortar store count is ~2,000 shops, +/- a few hundred.
- The report assumes that a purchase is a purchase, regardless of variant cover schemes or overships
There’s more to it, but you get the idea. It’s not as if John Jackson Miller, owner of Comichron, is simply handed sales data from all the distributors and creates a handy report. Miller works with what he has and lays his assumptions out on the Comichron website.
Casual readers, however, won’t necessarily know or care how the report is derived, and so the pundits come out to play to decry the ups and downs of certain titles based on the content or the creator. In reality, the entire report is worthless, except for one possible metric.
Why Don’t The Monthly Comichron Numbers Matter?
In a nutshell, there are too many assumptions and not enough good data.
The ideal scenario would include complete sales data from all distributors. That’s probably not going to happen anytime soon or ever, so the final tally is a guess.
The positioning of the comic titles in the ranking is relative to an assumption that Batman is the baseline, but we don’t know if Batman is still the baseline or if any title could truly be considered a baseline without accurate data.
Statistical analysis allows for extrapolation based on a relevant sample size as long as the sample size is 10% or more. 20% is the common rule of thumb. Comichron is extrapolating on 100 stores, less than half of the bare minimum sample needed for the known number of brick-and-mortar stores in America.
Overshipping and variant schemes, which absolutely play a factor in the sales of a title, are considered a sale like any other, so the health of a title based on its quality and reader appeal is always in question.
When you put that all together, the monthly report wouldn’t pass the stiff test as a statistically accurate report by any measure.
Is The Comichron Report Good For Anything?
Maybe. At best, all the report tells you is how well titles sell compared to other titles within a handful of stores. Batman might sell better than Superman but not as well as Amazing Spider-Man in that month for that handful of stores. However, the difference could be several dozen or one. We just don’t know.
That’s not much to go on, but it gives you a slight indication of reader interest and where they choose to spend their money if you ignore geographic and cultural factors. E.g. Superman comics might sell better in the Heartland, but the Northern Pacific areas tend to sell more offbeat stories written by Grant Morrison.
In other words, you get an idea of how a single title performs month-to-month compared to other titles on average, and that’s it.
Should The report Go Away?
No. Comichron should keep publishing and pushing for more data.
But as a reader, know the facts. When a comic is in the Top 5 or Top 10, that doesn’t mean it sold well. That means there are factors in play that helped it sell better than the comic below it. It’s a best-guess leaderboard that should never be taken as a sign of industry health.
We hope you found this article interesting. Come back for more reviews, previews, and opinions on comics, and don’t forget to follow us on social media:
If you’re interested in this creator’s works, remember to let your Local Comic Shop know to find more of their work for you. They would appreciate the call, and so would we.
Click here to find your Local Comic Shop: www.ComicShopLocator.com
As an Amazon Associate, we earn revenue from qualifying purchases to help fund this site. Links to Blu-Rays, DVDs, Books, Movies, and more contained in this article are affiliate links. Please consider purchasing if you find something interesting, and thank you for your support.