Tag: Top News

As we noted the other day, Brian Michael Bendis is a newly announced guest at this year's San Diego Comic-Con, and it's a very rare convention appearance for him. On his Tumblr he was asked if he'd be doing any other cons and his answer was pretty blunt:

Everyone hit go, complain, spinning wheel, white room, waiting list, unfair, people got in ahead of me, don't refresh!, crying, spinning wheel, oh god you hit refresh no why oh god no, why isn't there a lottery, Comic-Con sucks, hooray this is going to be the best week of my life, etc etc etc.

Industry analyst John Jackson Miller has taken the Bookscan numbers posted by Brian Hibbs, and added them with the Diamond year-end sales charts, and then triangulated them with a cosine angle, trapped the outlines in their own layer, tossed the results with a bit of olive oil and garlic, and presented it all for you to read. The above infographic gives a visual representation of sales for each product (GNs and periodical) in various channels; as Miller points out, library and digital sales are not included and the Bookscan numbers are very low, but the end result is a combined comics market of more than $700 million, which Miller notes, is the first time comics sales have reached this level since 1993 or 1994, the high times of speculation and chromium covers.

IDW’s first volume of the collected DOCTOR WHO OMNIBUS is a compact but substantial little tome gathering two long story arcs (“Agent Provacateur” and “The Forgotten”) and six one-shots that appeared in single issue...

It’s pretty much as you were in a fairly quiet month for new books. Boom’s dollar-book Deathmatch and the return of Hellboy, alongside a new Adventure Time spin-off and Brian Wood’s new book Mara are the notable debuts. Walking Dead, Saga & My Little Pony top the chart again, elsewhere the Image Firsts reprint programme features strongly, and a few long running licensed books end ahead of relaunches.

It's my FAVORITE day of the year, when Brian Hibbs posts the year-end sales from bookstores via the Bookscan chart. Now we know these numbers are significantly low, but as I always say, they present a metric. The huge take away? Well, we all knew The Waking Dead was a juggernaut,—sales in this franchise would have made it the #3 publisher all by itself—but after that it's kids comics all the way, led by the maybe-comics of Dork Diaries, but following by Big Nate, Ninjago, Ursula Vernon's Dragonbreath, Drama and so on.

In this week's PW Comics World, I interviewed Jeremy Short—creator of the study on comics comprehension referenced here—about that study and a general overview of current research on how comics affect learning and cognizance....