Marvel Wins 2011 Market Share, ‘Walking Dead’ Dominates Trades, ‘Justice League’ Leads Periodicals

Diamond Comics Distributors has released its list of the top-selling comic books and graphic novels for 2011 -- at least, the ones purchased by comics specialty stores and not necessarily resold to customers. Those tremendous caveats aside, the lists indicate some interesting trends. Most notably, DC Comics was not able to catch up to rival Marvel in terms of overall market share despite what Tom Spurgeon has accurately called the sales-stunt-of-all-sales-stunts, the New 52 (which didn't get underway until September, of course). However, DC did walk away from 2011 with nine of the ten best-selling comic books of the year, Justice League #1 being the leader.

The arcane calculus of the periodical wars are perhaps less interesting to you than the trade paperback/graphic novel numbers, which indicate great success for Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard, whose many volumes of The Walking Dead dominated the top of the list. Also in the top ten were Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neil's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century #2, Bill Willingham's Fables and Nick Spencer and Joe Eisma's Morning Glories. The only non-creator-owned graphic novel in 2011's top ten was Batman: Noel by Lee Bermejo.

Diamond's charts show that Marvel finished 2011 with 37.29% dollar share and 40.93% unit share, beating DC's 31.41% dollar share and 36.77% unit share. Image Comics ranked third in periodical sales, followed by a virtually tied Dark Horse and IDW Publishing.

Speaking with Newsarama last week, DC's Executive Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Business Development John Rood and SVP of Sales Bob Wayne downplayed the market share factor and said the company is "more about the profitability of these titles. We're more about the media and merchandise opportunities of these titles. And we're most interested that the retailers are continually excited about the stories and characters."

Spurgeon made the keen observation that only three comics in the top 20 have issue numbers above "#4", which could suggest something rather grim:

I wonder if the bigger story isn't so much Hulk Vs. Superman but both heroes against malaise and decline, and how the short-term story and resultant hype has genuinely become more important to the fate of these companies and their major players than long-term publishing success. There are only three comic books in the top 20 that have issue numbers beyond a half-dozen issues or so, that are in other words reliable market players for their content; Marvel didn't chart anything over 86,000 copies sold. Maybe a half-dozen or so of the New 52 books have already fallen under that point of sales that was astonishing when any comic book from a mainstream company started charting there in the mid-1990s.

A recent piece by Todd Allen for Publishers Weekly indicates that for direct market retailers, DC sets "the gold standard" for collected editions. In contrast, Marvel "leaves money on the table" with its perplexing reprint strategy whereby "a series with 8 volumes in it will frequently have two or three of the middle volumes out of print."

The complete 500 trades and 500 comics lists for 2011 can be found below. Once again, these numbers reflect only products sold to direct market comic book retailers.