The traditional idea that movies don’t help the sales of comics? Yeah, tell that to Batman:
The release of Christopher Nolan’s final Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises on July 20th had a major impact on sales of graphic novels sold in bookstores during August according to numbers released to ICv2 by Nielsen BookScan reporting service. Led by Frank Miller’s classic Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Geoff John’s recently published Batman: Earth One, Batbooks took the top four spots on the August list and six of the top eight titles. Altogether there were eight Batman-related books (including Insight Editions’ The Dark Knight Manual) in the Nielsen Top 20 for August.
Outside of all the Batman love, I am very happy to see that Gene Yang’s work on the Avatar: The Last Airbender books also seems to be drawing readers towards his own work: American Born Chinese is at #12 on the chart, rather wonderfully.
(Something very odd: I went back to May’s Bookscan numbers to see if Marvel’s Avengers books got a similar bump from that movie’s release, and… kind of? Not really? While an Avengers book is at the top of the charts, it’s not from Marvel – It’s DK Publishing’s The Avengers: The Ultimate Guide to the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, which isn’t actually a graphic novel – and there’s only one Marvel graphic novel on the chart: The Infinity Gauntlet, at #19. Seriously, is Marvel cursed in bookstores?)
September 7th, 2012 at 10:18 am
Do we know that the Batman movie is what pushed the Batman books?
September 7th, 2012 at 12:02 pm
Marvel just doesn’t know how to handle their book market properly.
Look at Warren Ellis’s Secret Avenger’s run. First off, Secret Avengers seems like a book many people waited for trade. It sold out heavily. The second volume even more so, its nearly impossible to find. Now, Ellis’s single issue run didn’t sell very well, so the hardcover was under-ordered, and is now totally unavailable. Marvel should go back to print on this, but instead, they print a similarly weak trade order, which sells out just as quickly. DC seems to support their catalog, which means that you can get their books when you want them. Marvel just charges $5 per issue for their HCs, and then doesn’t print more when they sell out, even at that high mark-up.
September 9th, 2012 at 6:18 am
Marvel has always been “meh” when it comes to their handling of trades .
But you also gotta admit that it’s easier for a movie goer tp venture into amain batman books and find at core the same experience than in the nolan movies .
Marvel stuff ? not so much .
Marvel has only truly recently begin streamlining their comics universe to look like their movies , otherise , Spiderman and the Avengers , Thor are quite different adventures , with lots of unknown characters . And let’s not even begin on a potential Hulk fan coming and realizing they are like 3 hulks right now .
The Ultimate universe is the closest thing they’ve got to the Marvel movies , and while usually awesome and rich of idea , it’s oh so dark and cynical