Nearly all the partners have changed, three years after the pandemic caused Diamond to shut down for several weeks, prompting DC comics to ultimately take its distribution elsewhere.
Image announced today it was moving to Lunar as its exclusive distributor effective in September — though Diamond also announced that it would continue to supply those comics as a wholesaler. That’s a first, because while it had such a deal to carry Marvel, IDW, and Dark Horse comics supplied by Penguin Random House, it had no such arrangement with Lunar for DC’s titles.
The upshot is that while 84% — five comics out of six — of the periodical business has moved somewhere other than Diamond since 2019, Diamond is still able to supply 71% of comics — all but DC’s.
Diamond has not published any monthly sales charts since April 2022, when the lopsided nature of them made the data less useful. The charts had all of Image and Boom’s sales, but only a portion of Marvel’s, and none of DC’s. Were Diamond to negotiate a deal with Lunar as a reseller for DC, it has the potential at least of producing rankings that might resemble what we’ve seen in the past.
In the meantime, Diamond has continued to release its reorder charts, and Comichron continues to republish them; the May 2023 and June 2023 pages include the rankings Diamond just released this morning, in which Image ironically had the top item on each chart.
Comichron founder John Jackson Miller has tracked the comics industry for more than 25 years, including a decade editing the industry’s retail trade magazine; he is the author of several guides to comics, as well as more than a hundred comic books for various franchises.
He is the author of novels including Star Wars: Kenobi, Star Wars: A New Dawn, Star Trek: Discovery – The Enterprise War, and his upcoming release, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – The High Country. Read more about them at his fiction site.
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