So Which Publisher Has The Biggest Selling Comic... On Average?

[Rich Johnston]

Marvel may have sold over 300,000 copies of Uncanny Avengers #1. Image may have sold almost 400,000 of Walking Dead #100.

BUt what about the lower selling titles? How do they stack up?

We're going to cheat a little by only including the Top 300 comics reported by Diamond that sold in comic shops in 2013. Which means that some of the smaller companies may get a boost my ignored the comics that didn't sell enough to get in the top 300. But there's one incontroversial point that sticks out.

Because Valiant is considered a "Small Press Publisher" by Diamond, in that it is outside the Top Ten of publishers. Yes, when it comes to saverage sales of books...

Here's a chart. Each measures a publisher, looks at the number of comics placed in the Top 300, their highest and lowest sales, and in the middle in bold, the average sale.

For which, Valiant is third. Only four or five books, it's true. But it is expanding...

October 2012

MarvelDCValiantImageDark HorseIDWBoomDynamite808542918266233037221483051629 9743792557721516170201636241025317061500014670115389752109967756563058571438252795201550255165161November 2012

MarvelDCValiantImageDark HorseIDWBoomDynamite688253425291325303722148305162 995754624606801282365663932473733183315965126411005612556883010022563058571315643664341527045464526December 2012

MarvelDCValiantImageDark HorseIDWBoomDynamite638254222308242009661515681691 75778128096398413094616923433853239314243112761220810197125217092491748791250847554676475546494649

[brenticles]

Huh? This is a really odd presentation. It looks like you are showing the median, not the average. How did you calculate average?

[DarthEwok]

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king"

And right now, the one-eyed man is still DC. Last month, a random issue of Batman sold nearly as many copies as Amazing Spider-Man #700 - a big anniversary issue, of the publisher's premiere character, which was also touted as the final issue of the series (some nuubs certainly believed this and bought the issue because of it)

Also if you look at last month's top 10, it featured a bunch of random DC issues (#15's) - and nearly all of the Marvel stuff was #1's and Marvel Now newly-launched books

[Lashina]

I wonder if there might be an error in the tables. For Marvel and DC, their respective highest and lowest numbers are the same in both Oct and Nov. And Valiant's highest number (but not the lowest) is the same between those two months as well.

[Mad_Man_Moon]

I have all these available, too ... I'll see if I can get a machine with excel for my file.
I hate using it in Googledocs

[tralfaz]

all my statistics knowledge fell out of my brain.

[Fred J Chamberlain]

I have to say that Valiant currently has a very inspired group of books. I was instantly hooked to each book I tried out with the exception of one. Archer & Armstrong has ignited something in Fred Van Lente, because I've never been a fan of his work, but ..... That book is clever and entertaining. Manuel Garcia's art on Bloodshot makes a somewhat engaging title moreso. I picked up Harbinger only last week and am really enjoying it as well.

[Jason A. Quest]

The methodology here is fundamentally broken, to the point of rendering the analysis and any conclusions drawn from it... pretty much meaningless. Only including books that sell above a certain threshold* is a bit like looking at the average height of a college's basketball team, and trying to discern something meaningful about how tall the students at that school are.

*Yes, I know: you don't have access to the full list. Science doesn't care why your data is useless.

[FitzTheRuke]

I'm no dummy... but I have no idea what this article is trying to say. In fact, I don't understand it a bit.

[bmontclare]

Would be interesting to see separate break-outs for DCU and Vertigo.