In the direct market only. In other avenues of distribution they do surprisingly bad, being maybe the fourth or fifth most popular publisher. Even within the direct market they did surprisingly bad with trades last year. A company with 70 years worth of acclaimed material taking a beating in the reprint game.

As far as industry growth is concerned, it's nearly all outside the direct market. That's bad news for Marvel.
Meanwhile, DC manages to remain about as relevant outside the direct market as they do within.

Multiple Saga trades have been on the NYT weekly bestseller list for over a year. 60+ weeks in a row on that list. Guardians Of The Galaxy is lucky to get ten, while a billion dollar movie is helping it.

Marvel isn't just about selling Spiderman comics in the hundreds of thousands, they're also in the market of selling C list solo titles simply to fill up the shelves and tie up retailer budget to keep other publishers from being on the shelf at all. They'd do a better job of that if they had a few licenses and a few genres outside superheroes I'd think.

Other companies do well in trades though. It's not because of the way things are, it's because of the way Marvel is.

Maus is still on the NYT bestseller list for comics.
Right now, not a single Marvel trade. Not one.

At the Amazon top 20, they have one.
Usual suspects are still there. Saga, Walking Dead, Maus, Persepolis.

At Barnes & Noble there isn't a single Marvel in the top 25. Maus is on there twice.

To say Persepolis is "hot" right now but Spiderman, Wolverine, Avengers, X-Men, Gurardians Of The Galaxy are not? That's simply not true. Marvel is simply failing to properly market themselves in the TPB market. Which is why DC superheroes still manage to make these lists. Certainly not because Superman is more hip.

Yeah, Deadpool sells more units in the direct market than Saga, we agree on that. The problem is outside the direct market Deadpool comics have absolutely no market. None at all. Zero. A Campbell variant isn't going to fix that either. According to Diamond, ten years ago Marvel had 7 of the top 25 bestselling trades/graphic novels, which was still pretty bad. Last year they had 2. Ten years ago Image had 2 of the top 25 trades. Now they have 16/25. From what I understand, reprints are where all the profits are at too.

Now, I'm having trouble tracking TPB growth over ten years, but this is for last year alone, and only through Diamond.
Comic book unit sales increased by a quarter of a percent. TPB unit sales are up 5.18%
Online and through bookstores you can expect those figures to only have greater distance between them. Staggering growth outside the direct market, and within barely a change at all.

Batman is doing very well on some of those lists, but it's the old classics, DKR and Killing Joke. Other lists have DC events, recent events, on the list, but sparsely. But also adding all of Marvel's trades up doesn't solve the problem. Variety is not the issue. Marvel's market share of trades is dismal. It's a real problem with the company. I guess not as severe a problem as it would be without the movies, but still. Marvel is not working out in the rapid growth areas of the industry. If I were a shareholder I'd be concerned about it.

And I still think things could have been very different if Marvel had just treated Epic with anything more than contempt. All these major players in indy comics were already there. And they loved Marvel. That's why they were there. McFarlane and Larsen love superheroes. They'd likely have lived to one day become Marvel executives. Which likely would have happened if instead of founding Image they had made Epic bigger than Vertigo.

It really is just Marvel that struggles in the trade department, it's very strange.

And Dupont, if I remember correctly Brian Hibbs had reported that trades had been growing in book stores and Amazon which he found out through a friend that has access through Bookscan. 

Don't forget that, by this point, Marvel was a publicly traded company, owned by shareholders who cared about profit; not innovation, creator rights, nor love of the industry. Gone were the days when Stan Lee and Roy Thomas could just launch an imprint on a whim or make significant changes to their employees' contracts. In fact, gone were Stan Lee (handling movie deals in LA) and Roy Thomas (left entirely).

Wizard #18 (February 1993)



Wizard is finally reporting on the Death of Superman, though with a clear reluctance that leaves no doubt as to where they stand on the issue. It gets bumped to the back of the news section, they give the two page write-up to Patrick Daniel O'Neill (they NEVER give these kinds of articles to O'Neill because he always slams hyped modern comics) who essentially makes fun of the phenomenon and dismisses it as a fad that's already over, while the usually objective Market Watch section has no end of things to say about the event, most strikingly that:



Had the Comics Journal said this, I would have applauded, but Wizard...attacking fans for buying into hype??? The big joke of all this is that, in the next paragraph, Market Watch goes on for the second month in a row about what a big deal Bloodshot #1 is. Well, Market Watch, why don't you compare the prices on those two books now? Superman #75 may only be going for $10-$20, but folks are practically paying people to take away their ten copies of Bloodshot #1.

It really does seem like DC can't do anything right in Wizard's eyes. A few months ago, they were slammed for not generating enough hype, and now they're slammed all the more viciously for being the kings of hype for a few brief months, all while Wizard's #1 pet publisher is still Image, the unquestionable kings of hype. In fact, even though the cover for this issue features Venom and Spidey, they gave the most attention in this issue to Image's newest creation, Wildstar, and talked Image's various projects and artists up throughout the issue, even while Market Watch admits that



Of course, they quickly add that



...because Wizard keeps telling them to.




On a different note, Wizard makes some interesting and tasteful choices for interviews for the second month in a row. Finally exhausting the number of times they can interview the Image artists, they talked to Dave Sim last issue, and speak to Wendy and Richard Pini and John Ostrander this time around.



Hindsight glimpses into the comic industry:

Though, surprisingly, Wizard doesn't make too big a deal of it, Image splits off from Malibu with this issue, and Malibu plans to launch their own universe of heroes.

Obviously, the Death of Superman is still on everyone's minds.

X-titles apparently still matter to some, as Wizard's Comic Watch exclusively discusses Silver Age X-Men first appearances

Wizard's continuing to run those two page ads for Comic-Fest, of which they are a significant partner

Though Wizard continues to present Image as the hottest thing ever, the news, ads, fan-generated covers, and sales figures all show Valiant having a far bigger impact at this point. In fact, their dollar shares have spiked in the wake of Bloodshot #1 and are almost as much as Image and Malibu's combined. I've never read most Image comics myself, but it truly seems like the only thing interesting about them is the first issues. I've yet to see an Image ad, nor news about Image, discussing a major event occurring within the pages of an already established Image title (the guest writers on Spawn aside). It seems like fans are starting to catch on to the fact that these new characters and series never really go anywhere. Even Wizard is dulling its enthusiasm a bit. I don't see Wildstar on this month's cover, after all, and yet virtually every new Image title prior to this one got the cover in the month prior to it being launched. Just look back at the last seven issues.

Marvel: 38.47% (this is a new low for the company since Wizard #1)
DC: 24.06% (practically double last month, presumably due, almost entirely, to the death of Superman)
Malibu/Image: 12.95% (up slightly, but still way down from its high point of 19.24%)
Valiant: 9.23% (this is a major upswing)
Dark Horse: 3.71% (back to normal after an unexplained spike last month. It would seem that Valiant stole those extra sales, which Dark Horse, in turn, stole from Image)
Others: 11.58 %

So there's definitely an approximate 11% of sales that float from company to company each month, usually among Image, Valiant, Dark Horse, and the other smaller presses. Meanwhile, DC's upswing seems to have come largely at Marvel's expense.



Industry news:

- The Death of Superman, Venom #1, and Wildstar #1 are the big topics of discussion this issue

- Valiant is still garnering new hype ahead of the release of Turok #1

- Marvel UK is expanding its number of titles

- ANIA: The Association of Black Publishers is launched. What a cool idea. I wonder what happened to it.

- Wizard makes a push for Continuity Comics, arguing that it's headed for a come-back

- Jim Shooter is launching Defiant Comics, though the company is unnamed at this point. All that's seen in this issue is a full page ad for Warriors of Plasm #1 (just called "Plasm" here).



Wizard shaping the comic book market?

They're certainly trying to, here. When the most widely read comic news magazine AND price guide repeatedly pronounces that the big hyped event of the month will be worthless down the road, they have to realize that impressionable collectors are listening. Additionally, Market Watch asserts in this issue that Image's back issue prices are "solid as a rock," when that has NEVER been the case in their sales reports before, nor is it reflected in the Top 10 for this month. The price guide has been valuing the Image back issues pretty high (for example, Youngblood #1 is stated to be worth $9.00), but if anyone were actually paying those prices, I have to think Market Watch wouldn't have described those issues as having no demand on the back market as recently as two issues back, and that they'd have a more fixed position on the Wizard Top 10 (currently, Spawn #4 and WildCATS #2 hold the #8 and #10 spots respectively). If a comic I bought less than a year ago was already actually worth $9, I'd think it would be getting some attention.

Wizard most certainly has a very pro-Image, pretty pro-Marvel and Valiant, very anti-DC bias that has become clear by this point, and they clearly have a large built-in audience, more so than any other comic news outlet (and, possibly, more than any other price guide), but if they were in full control of the market, we'd see Image back issue values going sky high and absolutely no interest in DC's follow-up Funeral for a Friend event. Clearly, neither ended up proving true.



Wizard's Comic Watch:

Uncanny X-Men #49: 1st Polaris

Uncanny X-Men #54: 1st Havok



Wizard's Top 10:



1. Superman #75 (death of Superman)
2. Bloodshot #1
3. Eternal Warrior #4 (1st Bloodshot)
4. Eternal Warrior #5 (2nd Bloodshot)
5. Shadowman #8 (1st Master Darque)
6. Magnus Robot Fighter #12 (1st Turok)
7. Magnus Robot Fighter #5 (1st Rai)
8. Spawn #4 (limited print run, Image #0 coupon)
9. Rai #0 (1st new Rai)
10. WildCATS #2 (more Image coupons)


Clearly, Valiant is still king when it comes to modern age back issue collectors.


Final Thoughts:

Really, what is Wizard's beef with DC? There's even a photo in the price guide of Shamus palling around with Marvel president Terry Stewart, and this comes after the pages and pages of write-ups for upcoming Marvel, Valiant, and Image projects (even when Image has practically nothing in the works). At one point, it was easy to assume Wizard was just reflecting the audience's disinterest in DC, but they so actively dismiss people's interest in the Death of Superman over and over again in this issue when they've done nothing but encourage such absurd hype about every major event Marvel and Image have put out over the past two years.

Seriously, is there an agenda here or just a deep seeded bias?

I tracked down last year's article and it seems his next one should be do by the end of February. Here's what he reports:


Year   Total Units   Growth   Total Dollars   Growth

2003  5,495,584    -----      $66,729,053    -----


2004  6,071,123   10.5%    $67,783,487   1.6%


2005  7,007,345   15.4%    $75,459,669   11.3%


2006  8,395,195   19.8%    $90,411,902   19.8%


2007  8,584,317    2.3%     $95,174,425   5.27%


2008  8,334,276   -2.9%     $101,361,173  6.5%


2009  7,634,453   -8.4%     $93,216,014   -8.0%


2010  6,414,336   -15.9%   $85,266,166   -8.5%


2011  5,696,163   -11.2%   $79,961,951   -6.2%


2012  5,696,163    -4.53%   $89,918,354   12.45%


2013  5,654,351     3.97%   $96,062,709     6.83%


He goes on to celebrate increases in both categories for 2013 so I'm assuming that the number he wrote there for units was a typo meaning that the real number was 5,696,289. As you can see the market isn't as bullish as I thought it was but its still impressive.
The full article can be read here though I'll quote one piece from it as it deals directly with the subject at hand: