Image Comics launches its own sales chart

With the comics industry sadly lacking in sales charts to mark success stories, Image Comics has rolled up its sleeves and made its own sales chart! The list will run every second Tuesday of the month and cover the previous month, with Top Ten sellers for both Comics in the direct market and books in the direct and book store market.

With the need for some kind of sales metrics more vital than ever, I’ve been making my own attempts at sales charts here – with GlobalComix stepping up and supplying their own charts on a regular basis.  ICv2 has its own charts based on ComicHub data – which are getting more traction in the discourse all the time. I’ve been in contact with a few other entities to get more information, but it is slow going.

Frankly, I’m surprised more publishers haven’t done their own sleeve rolling and supplied their own charts – maybe with this Image Comics sales chart leading the way this will become more common, and more creators can once again proudly puff out their chests and say “I’m #1!”

As for June 2024 at Image, it had impressive debuts – Destro #1 (by Dan Watters, Andrei Bressan & Adriano Lucas), Scarlett #1 (by Kelly Thompson, Marco Ferrari & Lee Loughridge), and Misery #1 (by Todd McFarlane & Szymon Kudranski) – and continued success for the Energon line and Ghost Machine. Here are the charts!

TOP 10 COMICS (Direct Market)

#1 DESTRO #1

#2 SCARLETT #1

#3 TRANSFORMERS #9

#4 VOID RIVALS #10

#5 GI JOE: A REAL AMERICAN HERO #307

#6 MISERY #1

#7 SPAWN #354

#8 UNIVERSAL MONSTERS’ CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON LIVES #3

#9 GEIGER #3

#10 ROOK: EXODUS #3

Unsurprisingly, the first collection of the Duke titles from Energon led June book sales.

TOP 10 BOOKS (Direct & Book Market)

#1 DUKE, VOL. 1 TP

#2 GEIGER DELUXE EDITION, VOL. 1 HC

#3 HACK/SLASH: BACK TO SCHOOL TP

#4 PHANTOM ROAD, VOL. 2 TP

#5 PETROL HEAD, VOL. 1 TP

#6 THE DEAD LUCKY, VOL. 2 TP

#7 BLOODRIK TP

#8 OUR BONES DUST TP

#9 GRIZ GROBUS TP

#10 1949 HC

To show the value of sales charts, it strikes me that that Geiger, by Geoff Johns, Gary Frank, Brad Anderson and Rob Leigh, has appeared on this chart and the GlobalComix charts. The Ghost Machine line seems to be doing quite well! A surprise hit! Good news!

And to cross reference this with the ComicHub listings for June, here’s the Image books that chart there for comics:

And books:

Please note: these are NOT apples to apples comparisons. The ICv2/ComicHub charts measures sales to readers. We don’t know the metric for the Image charts (although I reached out for clarification) but it’s probably sell-in to stores. They measure different things, one assumes.

That said, the ComicHub list of reader purchased comic books lines up pretty well with the Image list, so, as they say, it tracks.

You might be wondering what is going on with the ComicsPRO metadata project, which will eventually lead to integrated sales charts between all the distributors. Last time I asked, I was told progress was very slow. Perhaps we’ll have an update at SDCC.

Anyway, big thanks to Image Comics for doing this and giving us something to discuss!