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Every Generation Throws a Hero Up the Pop Charts

It’s time to have some fun with charts. 

Each and every month, Diamond comics publishes a ranking of their top selling comics and books.  These numbers reflect the amount of comics that Diamond sells to the American direct market, i.e. your local comic book shop as long as you live in the United States (and maybe even Canada.)  Over at Comichron, John Jackson Miller keeps track of these lists, projecting unit sales based off of any information he has.  Every month, sites like CBR and The Beat offer their own analysis on what’s going on each and every month, trying to draw conclusions about how a book’s sales this month compared to last months, 6 months ago and even up to 5 years ago.  All fine and dandy information.
 
But there are so many other ways to look at it other than month in and month out.

Taking Miller’s charts, I decided to track every month’s #1 books since January, 2000 through to November, 2010 (the latest information that’s been released) and try to calculate just who’s owned the top of the sales charts.  And the information sadly isn’t that surprising.


For companies, the winner is Marvel with 59.5% of the #1s during the past 131 months.  DC is of course #2 with 32.1% of the #1s.  No surprises there.

What is interesting to see is that during the past 11 years, the last time a non DC/Marvel company had a #1 book on Diamond’s charts was November 2002, when Image and MV Creation’s Masters of the Universe topped the charts.  And for a good portion of the year before that, various Transformer books topped the charts.  Hurrah for licensed books in the early 2000s.  The last time a creator-owned title topped the charts was in July, 2000 when Spawn #100 was the best seller for the month.  Since December, 2002, it’s been a two horse race with only Marvel and DC competing.  

The sad and disappointing way to look at this is that in the last 131 months, only 5 companies have had #1 books. FIVE. Fantagraphics hasn't had a #1 book. Crossgen didn't have a #1 book. Oni? Top Shelf? IDW? Dark Horse? SLG? Not a #1 out of any of them. Even looking at Marvel and DC, it's only their mainstream books. No Icon or Vertigo. No Wizard of Oz or Metal Gear Solid. However well those books may do in the more mass markets, they don't appear to make much of a dent in the direct market that Diamond controls.


The past decade has also been been highlighted by the dominance of writers in mainstream comics.  Since 2000, Brian Michael Bendis has had the most #1 books with 21 (15.3%.)  In fact, you can chart the BMB era of comics as really beginning in December 2004, when New Avengers #1 was the best selling comic.  But this wasn’t Bendis’ first #1.  That occured a year earlier when Ultimate Fantastic Four #1 was Diamond’s best.  Bendis co-wrote that book with Mark Millar.  But from December, 2004 on, Bendis is a makes fairly regular appearances in the #1 spot with New Avengers, Dark Avengers, House of M, Secret Invasion, Siege, Avengers and New Avengers (again.)  2005 was a good year for Bendis, as well as 2008 and 2009.  Thanks to the event books he anchored for Marvel, those were the years he had tight grasps on Diamond’s charts.

The #2 writer may surprise you.  When I started this little endeavour, I figured Bendis would have been fighting with Geoff Johns for the 1 & 2 positions.  Actually our dark horse runner up is Jeph Loeb with 13% of the #1s with 13 of them.  Now the fascinating thing about Loeb in this is that he’s not a Johnny-come-lately like Bendis. Loeb’s first #1 during the past decade was in October, 2002 with Batman #608.  Of course, Jim Lee may have had something to do with that.  Loeb and Lee’s Batman collaboration scored eight #1 spots over the next 2 years.  

Loeb has always had the good fortune of attaching himself to popular artists.  Shortly after his Batman run, he began a run on Superman/Batman with Michael Turner, one of Wizard’s “Hot” artists of that time.  Loeb and Turner’s Supergirl story won the #1 spot twice and even Loeb’s first issue of Superman/Batman with Carlos Pacheco was a top selling book.  And unlike Bendis and Johns, Loeb has also produced a fair amount of books at both DC and Marvel.  Starting in April, 2007, Loeb starts reappearing on Diamond’s charts with books like Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America, Ultimates 3, Hulk and Ultimatum.

Coming in with 14 #1s by himself is Geoff Johns.  His first #1 was as part of the writing collective on DC Countdown to Infinite Crisis in March, 2005.  Like Bendis, his own solo #1 wouldn’t be too long afterwards.  In May, 2005, Green Lantern #1 would be the best selling comic.  Following that, every issue of Infinite Crisis topped the chart while 7 out of 8 issues of Blackest Night would as well.  But if you want to count his collaborations on Countdown to Infinite Crisis and the current Brightest Day, Johns actually ties with Loeb for a total of 17.

Add in Mark Millar (11 #1s) and Grant Morrison (8 #1s) and you see that only 5 writers have contributed to 50% of the #1 books during this period.

Of course, I think anyone who paid attention to these things would have guessed these outcomes.  Marvel and DC have owned the last 10 years on the sales charts, while Bendis and Johns have dominated the top 5.  I have a feeling that if we dug into the top 5 books or the top 10 during this same period, we’d see a lot of the similar or the same results.  It’s the dominance of LCS sales by a limited number of companies and creators that has given us the event-fatigued audience that we seem to have now.  Event fatigue? I don’t even know if that’s accurate because the top sellers of 2010 have either been event books or first issues.  That’s what the comic shops are buying. They must be selling all those issues of X-Men #1 (the new one with those vampires who are all the rage nowadays) to someone.

Sadly what we don't see are the vestiges of the newsstands, those non-direct market outlets where Archie numbers supposedly put our current best sellers to shame. Or the library markets who Marvel is catering to with their "Best Selling Authors" line and books like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and anything Roy Thomas is writing nowadays. Maybe if we had those numbers, we'd see something that looks like a healthier, more diversified comic market and a comic shop that was open to every kind of book.