Fun With 2019 Best Seller Lists Part 1 - Books!
The Blog is back! In theory…
Sorry for the gap in posts there everyone. Best laid plans of mice and men and all that jazz. I had ideas at the beginning of 2019 that didn’t exactly shape up the way I expected and my hours in the day evaporated before I knew what was happening.
That said, I’m back and I have an out line of a plan to hopefully communicate more with everyone about the stores and the business of comics and games and related stuff!
We’ll kick off the year with some looks back at what did great in 2019, and today I’m going to talk about books! Monthly comics will come later because that list is more complicated. Without further ado, the top twenty best selling books at More Fun Comics and Games in 2019!
Teen Titans Raven TP
Snotgirl TP Vol 1
Snotgirl TP Vol 2
Monstress TP Vol 1
God is Disappointed in You
Batman White Knight TP
Saga TP Vol 1
Umbrella Academy TP Vol 1
Adventure Zone GN Vol 1 Here There be Gerblins
My Hero Academia GN Vol 1
Guts GN
Paper Girls TP Col 1
Saga TP Vol 9
Adventure Zone GN Vol 2 Murder on Rockport
Sailor Moon TP Vol 1
Critical Role TP Vol 1 Vox Machina
One Punch Man GN Vol 1
Mister Miracle TP
Uzumaki 3in1 DLX ED HC Junji Ito
Komi Can’t Communicate GN Vol 1
Suprised by some of the entries on that list? I was! Some notes to point out about other books missing, first of all. Coming in at 21 was the Strange Planet book. It came out just before Thanksgiving and flew off the shelves all holiday season. Watchmen and Infinity Gauntlet had new editions come out that split the sales between two different line items. If you combine their line items, both books would have dropped in the top 15. And just missing the list is the phenomenon of Dog Man. Vol 7 was 22nd, and Vol 8 only had a couple weeks to sell this year and still squeaked into my top 30.
More Fun Comics and Games #1 book of 2019!
Seeing Teen Titans Raven at the top of the list for the year was a surprise to me, to be sure. I knew the book was doing well, but not THAT well. While DC’s new young adult books have been hit or miss thus far, a single book breaking out with numbers like this probably means the lines are not going the way of previous imprints like Minx or Zuda any time soon. It’s a good thing to see books like this and Snotgirl finding audiences in the current market.
As you dig through this list, there’s a lot of variety here that stands out. It’s also surprising to see Saga still moving so well in spite of the series being on hold while the creators are getting things ready for the second part of the story.
God is Disappointed in You? That one’s a bit of an outlier and probably deserves its own blog post in the near future. It’s a great book that doesn’t seem to get the attention it deserves.
It can’t all be warm and fuzzies, though. Ask anyone who knows me, and they’ll tell you I always try to focus on the positive and constructive insight. One of the reasons I work over lists like this is because I want to go to the annual ComicsPRO meeting in February with some insight to share with the publishers about what I see in the market and maybe find out more from them since they have access to much more data than I.
My talking point this year might just be the dearth of new Marvel and DC output in these top seller lists. In order to find a book that fits into the big two universes that released in 2019 besides Mister Miracle, I had to go all the way to 35th place for Dark Knights Metal. I gave up counting lines on the sheet at 50, and had to go well past that to find the first Marvel TP released in 2019 on the list, and that was Cosmic Ghost Rider : Baby Thanos Must Die.
This is not a great state of things, in my opinion. With the caveat that I do get to sell the serialized versions of these books well in advance, it seems to me that comic specialty stores should be moving more copies of books that are aimed at their audience than the numbers I’m seeing here. It’s not like people don’t have other options for buying books like Guts and Raven, so why are they simply blowing DCU and MU graphic novel output out of the water like this? Maybe it is just me? I’m genuinely concerned about the current editorial output at the two largest publishers having enough appeal to be sustainable in the long term, though. I’m also not sure what the solution is, given the constraints publishers work under.
That said, if you look at the history of comics over the last century, a pattern appears of lackluster sales and a willingness to throw anything at the wall to see if someone will notice leading to some of the best comics in history being produced.