Monthly Comic Book Sales Report: February 2015

February was a great month for the Batman titles! 10 of the titles that we cover all had tremendous increases in their sales, and one had an unexpectedly large dip.

Below you will find a chart detailing the 25 comics that this site reviews, along with the total sales for this month and several previous months. Numbers displayed are in the thousands.

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That’s right, 10 titles had major increases in their sales last month. The biggest being Multiversity at a whopping increase of 11,419 followed by Batman at 7,874. The other 8 books that had increases all saw between 3 and 4 thousand in additional sales last month. For the most part, our top ten all went up and the rest continued their expected slow bleeds. The one exception from the lower end of our chart was Catwoman. She saw a very generous increase of 4,064. I wish I could share with you some grand revelation as to why so many issues saw a sudden surge, but I’m afraid I don’t have one. If this had been the sales for March, I could have extrapolated that the increase in sales was due to so many story arcs wrapping up at the same time and people wanting to see how things were being resolved before Convergence, but that just isn’t the case. However, something that I did notice was that the December totals are all very close to the February ones. February might not be a case of an upswing so much as things just return to normal after a peculiarly bad month (January).

The biggest loser of the month also ended up being the biggest surprise in my opinion. Batgirl lost a total of 4,216. It had seemed that her book was entering the phase in which it was leveling off and actually starting to gain, but this turn of events threw that prognosis right out the window. Over the last couple of Monthly Reports I had been concerned over Grayson’s steady decline, but it looks like the two may have switched places as Grayson was one of this month’s gainers. I guess I’m going to have to put Batgirl on my radar now.

We have been seeing some rather unusual numbers recently and they are in large part due to this service called Loot Crate. It is basically this service that you subscribe to, and after paying a fee, you get sent a box every month with a bunch of random stuff in it that should appeal to your average geek/gamer/comic enthusiast. I guess its purpose is to expose you to things that you might not necessarily check out on your own. It’s kind of like the wine of the month club. I’m bringing this up because it has been seriously skewing the sales for comic books recently. If you look back at some previous reports you will find that The Walking Dead, Star Wars, and now Orphan Black are all bringing in unexpected large numbers. This is because of Loot Crate.

Last month, Star Wars came in at the ridiculously high number of 985,976. As you can see from the sales chart below, it is now down to a more reasonable level. Part of this bloat was due to Loot Crate and the rest was due to all those people wanting to snatch up a #1 for Star Wars. This months top 50 chart is an excellent opportunity to bring up a more balanced way to evaluate this data. If you are only interested in number of sales, then read it as it stands, but if you are interested in a comic’s true standing, you shouldn’t count titles on the chart that have a low issue number. 99% of the time they didn’t make it to that position on the list of their own merit, but as a result of the number on their cover. With this in mind, we can see that the true top performers are Batman, Spider-Man, Justice League, and the like. Mind you, I’m not dismissing Star Wars completely. I’m sure once it levels off it will still be in the top 10 somewhere, but these current numbers should not be seen as indicative of where it will eventually place.

Links

For your convenience, links to the top 5 best selling books from February that we review.

I’m also going to throw in Multiversity: Mastermen, since it got such a huge turnout.