Batman SpiderGeddon & Walking Dead Anniversary Variants Top October 2018 Sales

Batman and Spider-Geddon performed well, if not spectacularly, but The Walking Dead's 15th Anniversary made Image Comics very happy.

Below you'll find the sales estimates for comics and trade paperbacks sold in the direct market for October, 2018. The sales numbers below are estimates based on the information provided by Diamond Comics Distributors earlier this month. Sales estimates for September, 2018 can be found here.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when reading this data. These numbers are just estimates for the sales through Diamond to direct market retailers. It does not include any sales outside of the Diamond channel such as newstands, book stores or overseas markets. Since the majority of habitual comic book readers are served through this sales channel, these numbers are a good indicator of the core sales trends at the retail level. While not all copies will sell to readers, each retailer is buying what they think they can sell so the trends at the retail level should be a close enough reflection of the sales trends at the reader level for the purposes of discussion.

The breakdowns are for just the top comics and top trades listed below. These are not the overall market share. I only deal with numbers that I can see and kick around in my ever evolving number crunching system. Sometimes the numbers get a bit battered and bruised in the process.

The estimated total sales for the top 300 comics was 7,231,202 comics which is up by 533,236 units from September and up by 202,551 units from October 2017. Marvel Comics had the largest percentage of the top 300 comics with 42.52% of the total units sold followed by DC Comics with 35.51%.

The top selling comic from Marvel Comics was Spider-Geddon (2018) #1 in slot 3 with an estimated 104,899 units and for DC Comics was Batman (2016) #56 in rank 1 with an estimated 107,578 units. The Walking Dead's 15th Anniversary variants combined for sales exceeding 385,000 units.

The estimated total sales for the top 300 trades was 316,292 trades which is down by 31,021 units from September and down by 5,709 units from October 2017.

Topping the trades list in October was Batman White Knight by DC Comics with 12,065 units.

I'll be back later with an analysis of the numbers below.

If you'd like to listen to an in-depth discussion of the sales data, check out the Mayo Report episodes of the Comic Book Page podcast at www.ComicBookPage.com. In addition to those episodes, every Monday is a Weekly Comics Spotlight episode featuring a comic by DC, a comic by Marvel and a comic by some other publisher. I read around 200 new comics a month so we cover a wide variety of what is current being published. If you are looking for more or different comics to read, check out the latest Previews Spotlight episode which features clips from various comic book fans talking about the comics they love. With thousands of comics in Previews every month, Previews Spotlight episodes are a great way to find out about things which may have flown under your comic book radar.