Marvel dominates the top ten this month with Star Wars, Spiderman, and….Howard the Duck? Batman: Arkham Knight does manage to slip into the number 9 spot, but the absence of DC’s biggest hitters (Batman and Justice League) really shook up the playing field.
Below you will find a chart detailing the 26 comics that this site reviews, along with the total sales for this month and several previous months. Numbers displayed are in the thousands. (Batman and Justice League were both delayed till April 29th, so there are no sales totals for the month of March for these two titles.)
[table “15” not found /]This month saw three titles with an increase in sales. Teen Titans was the title that saw the biggest increase, going up an additional 4,312 in sales. Detective Comics also saw a healthy increase of 1,428. After February’s staggering drop in sales of 5k, Batgirl seems to have recouped some of her losses. While not enough to fully make up for the decline, an increase of 849 is still nothing to scoff at. Other than these three titles, everything else managed to stay relatively stable. Either holding at last months numbers or bleeding only minutely. The new addition to our roster is Batman: Arkham Knight. It came in at 73,266 and placed 9th on the ranking for the month. Without the success of the first issue of this new title, DC would have been completely shut out of the top ten.
While we are here to talk about Batman, there honestly isn’t that much worth elaborating on this month (next month will be more interesting once the Convergence numbers come in and we can compare those to the ongoing titles), so I’m going to throw in a little analysis on Star Wars’ domination of the last 3 months to make this a little more interesting. If nothing else, it will give us an idea of when we can expect their numbers to calm down and allow some other titles back into the upper tiers.
STAR WARS – Jan/Feb/Mar 2015
[table “16” not found /]I mentioned this in a previous article, but that first haul on Star Wars #1 was a completely ridiculous number for a comic to have generated. Granted, we now know that Loot Crate had a significant amount to do with that, having ordered over 300,000 copies. However, the comic is now on issue 3 and the bleed has dropped to only 1K between February and March. The fact that the comic is already leveling off at 161K shows that even after the initial purchases made by Loot Crate and buyers only interested in getting a number 1 have worn off, the comic is still tens of thousands over its competitors. It’s highly likely that Star Wars is going to remain at the number one spot for quite some time.
While Star Wars is doing phenomenally well, Vader and Leia are both continuing to decline at a much steeper grade than the flagship title. While we don’t have the data for Leia’s third issue yet, at this time I’m going to extrapolate that it will be similar to Vader’s since both sets of their other numbers are so similar. From experience, I’m going to surmise that these two titles will eventually fall in the range of 65-70K once their bleeds stabilize. They will be hefty contenders for the top ten, but will most likely usually fall between the 10-20 range in ranking. Which is still a feat worth recognizing.
Links
For your convenience, links to the top 5 best selling books from March that we review.
- Batman: Arkham Knight #1
- Harley Quinn #15
- Detective Comics #40
- Batman & Robin #40
- The Multiversity: Ultra Comics #1
March 2015 – Top 50
[table “17” not found /]
