Monthly Comic Book Sales Report: September 2015

I’m not going to talk extensively about September. For the most part, everything dropped in sales, and it’s kind of bumming me out. The only issues that saw an increase were Detective Comics, Batman Beyond, and Injustice. But don’t worry, despite September being uneventful, I still have some interesting things to discuss.

Below you will find a chart detailing the 32 comics that this site reviews, along with the total sales for this month and several previous months. Numbers displayed are in the thousands. Keep in mind that these numbers represent physical copies sold. Numbers for the sales of digital comics are not currently being reported to the general public. Also, be aware that comics like Injustice are available in the digital format before print. This means that the bulk of their real sales are hidden to us.

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There has been a lot of discussion about variants having a huge effect on sales, so as promised, I started tracking this. I’ve only been keeping an eye on it for the last 2 months, so I can’t speak too much about it, but nevertheless, I wanted to share what I have discovered so far. I’m not seeing too much impact at this juncture. When looking at comics that had a variant for both August and September I saw the usual slow bleed, so nothing unusual there. Then I looked at issues that didn’t have a variant for August but did for September. These were Robin: Son of Batman, Batman Beyond, and Black Canary. What I found was that Robin’s numbers dropped and the other two only went up by about 400 each. Looking at these numbers without multiple months to compare them with doesn’t leave me with much to go on right now. Even so, these are far less staggering than I was expecting. Especially when you look at something like Secret Six who went from 22 to 30 to 17 when they were given a variant and then had it taken away. With the other 3 books, it is likely that their bleed was equivalent to their variant intake, resulting in the numbers staying fairly level. But Secret Six ended up taking in double that. I’ll continue to monitor this, but with the exception of Secret Six, I’m not seeing variants having a significant effect on sales just yet.

Batman comics (2011 to present) displayed in order of highest grossing to least grossing.

[table “27” not found /]

I recently became curious about how well Snyder’s Jim Bat arc was really doing. I took the time to research all 44 issues of Batman. Batman #44 ended up at number 38 on the list. That means 37 other issues outperformed it. I’m not going to list all those because that would take forever. I will share with you the 6 below it. Issue 28, 37, 34, 38, 30, and 31. To save you the time of figuring out which issues those were, I’ll provide a quick snippet. 28 was the sneak peak at Batman Eternal, 37 was the EndGame issue where Joker hides under Gordon’s bed, 34 is the one where Batman imprisons that serial killer in the Joker’s old cell, 38 was the Endgame issue with Crazy Quilt, and 30/31 were the first two chapters of the Riddler arc from Zero Year. While it is true that the sales for these issue are still 2 to 3 times more than most other comic titles out there, I still thought it would be interesting to highlight which issues were at the bottom of Snyder’s barrel, so to speak. I was actually quite shocked to see some of these that low on the list. I expected to find 28 and 34 down here, since they were more like sneak peaks than actually necessary chapters of an ongoing story. I also expected to find the two-part Clayface story down here, since it wasn’t part of some major arc, but those actually came in at 14 and 21 on the list. 37 was actually my favorite chapter of Endgame, so to see it this low was the biggest surprise. Is there anything on the list that shocked you? Let me know in the comments.

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For your consideration, the lowest selling books that could very well be worth your time. While these books are low in sales, they received incredibly high scores by the reviewing team. Check them out!