More News From the Week

Here are a few more things to close out what was an interesting week.

Brightest Reign

DC is clearly betting heavily on the Blackest  Night aftermath as the Brightest Day plans look quite a bit like what Marvel did with Dark Reign.  Tony Bedard will take over writing Green Lantern Corps while Pete Tomasi is moving over to launch Green Lantern Emerald Warriors, which will center around Guy Gardner.  Sadly those two books will not stand a chance in sales as most people will be spending their money on the main Green Lantern book and the twice a month Brightest Day book.

Bookscan 2009

Brian Hibbs has a very long but interesting look at the Bookscan numbers for 2009.  These are the numbers from the mainstream book market separate from the Direct Market.  There are quite a few interesting things that can be found from this.  I will quickly go over a few of the things I found interesting.

Watchmen blew away everything in terms of individual sales.  It clocked in at 424,814 units sold for the soft cover, which doesn’t include the hard cover and special edition.  That is only a percentage of the real number as Bookscans at best only represents about 70% or so the real numbers.  The success of Watchmen is unprecedented.  The hype from the movie lead to the initial spike in sales but it never stopped even as the movie did not perform well.  Incidentally Watchmen sold 308, 396 units in 2008.  It’s not hard to see why Dan Didio is rumored to be trying to create more Watchmen related comics.

Thanks mostly to Watchmen but also to a number of Batman titles DC completely obliterated Marvel in book market sales.  DC’s total unit sales was 1,902,181 and Marvel’s was 954,335.  One of the most interesting reasons for the difference comes from the movies.  The Watchmen and Dark Knight movies lead to high sales for both properties, while the Iron Man and Wolverine movies have done little for Marvel’s sales.  This probably helps explain why Marvel is so hard nosed about pushing the $3.99 price tag while DC has more sensible pricing schemes.

Over all Manga once again dominated everything.  Watchmen may have sold more then any individual volume of manga but popular manga like Naruto have numerous volumes that all sell well.  Sales are declining for manga in general.  Hibbs made an interesting point that the decline is likely do in large part to kids that were big on reading manga are loosing interest as they grow older, which is similar to the trend comics has had in the past.  It makes sense as almost all the manga in the top 750 of the Bookscan list is the kind geared for kids.  I could not find any of the manga geared for adults in the top 750, not even Pluto.  It does reflect the divide between manga and comics as many of the people that read Watchmen would like Pluto, Vagabond, and other adult manga if they knew about it.  It probably helps explain Viz and other manga publisher looking to try and reach the adult market.  It’s clear that adult market for non manga related titles is growing strong.

It is worth noting that this was all in a recession year so there was some drop in sales collectively but a good sign that it wasn’t major.  It’s also really good to see small press and creator owned books doing well in the mainstream with things like Jeff Smith’s Bone and Kirkman’s Walking Dead.

That is just a few of the interesting things that the list brings up.  I’m sure others will have plenty to say about it.