The State of the Stats

Here are the most recent sales charts stuff.

The most useful comic book sales information released is the monthly numbers dump from Diamond Comics Distributors of their top sellers for the prior month in what they call "Comics" (generally stapled comics priced under $10 and without an ISBN) and "Graphic Novels" (generally bound books priced $10 or higher and with an ISBN, also frequently called "Trade Paperbacks", even when they're hardcovers). Various sites take those numbers (which don't give actual sales but rather an order index of relative sales), apply some known sales numbers to them and get estimates of the sales. There used to be a small variation in the estimates from various sources, but rarely more than 1%, and even that has been down to zero for several years now. So presumably whatever publishers are giving them sales numbers to compare are the same publishers.

John Jackson Miller's The Comics Chronicles is an invaluable resource, with comprehensive direct market charts going back almost two decades, and lots of information on earlier stuff as well. Most recently he has the January 2014 Diamond numbers (now including the full top 400 on the comics chart, plus some small publisher entries below that).

John Mayo provides the analysis of the information for Comic Book Resources. Here's his chart for January 2014. He adds a few interesting things, like comparisons with sales of the previous issue and attempts to give accumulated sales figures for books which have been on the "Graphic Novel" chart more than once.

Mayo also does the Comic Book Page Podcast, which includes separate monthly episodes where he takes about each chart.

The comic book industry site ICV2 also posts the numbers and some analysis of the overall market trends based on them.  You can get links to all their charts and reports back to 2001 over here.

News site The Beat includes monthly columns based on the ICV2 comics chart, looking separately at the sales trends for DC, Marvel and other publishers. You can get the most recent ones, and other sales related posts, over here.

Outside the direct market serviced by Diamond, the only source with hard numbers is the annual look at BookScan's reported sales written by Brian Hibbs over at Comic Book Resources.  Here's his look at 2013, which has links to prior years. ICV2 posts the BookScan Top 20 each month, with just ordinal rankings and not sales numbers.

Other mass-market sources lack actual numbers, but are still of interest.  Dave Carter takes a weekly look at Amazon's top 50 over at his Yet Another Comics Blog, and the New York Times has weekly lists of hardcover, softcover and manga bestsellers.