Observations on April 2014 Comics Chart - The Rising

Only a handful of significant (greater than 3%) increases in April's Diamond Comics Chart.

SUPERIOR SPIDER-MAN #31 (MAR) : +58% : +49885 units
Final issue of the series, and closely tied to the big launch of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN last month. The increase is even more impressive if you compare it to only first month sales of #30, which had significant re-orders. Then it would be +80%. Anyway, despite everything this series did seem to be a story that got some good traction among the pool of readers still buying comics in direct market outlets for actual story content reasons.

DEADPOOL #27 (MAR) : +41% : +17896 units
A lot of factors in this rise for a significantly higher priced $10 issue , including new stories from past creators, a lot of covers and more.

SUPERMAN #30 (DC) : +11% : +3683 units
ACTION COMICS #30 (DC) : +10% : +3578 units
SUPERMAN WONDER WOMAN #7 (DC) : +4% : +1849 units

The Superman family of books has a crossover featuring the villain Doomsday. The first time they did that had a lot more impact than increases of less than 4000 copies...

WARLORD OF MARS #100 (DE) : +58% : +3244 units

Adding a bunch of stuff together to artificially get to a landmark final issue before the upcoming reboot (while a #100 is gold, a #101 is poison apparently). Big percentage increase, which you get when sales are so low. There's a reason we're not seeing JOHN CARTER 2 opening in theatres this summer...

WALKING DEAD #125 (IMA) : +3% : +2102 units
TMNT ONGOING #33 (IDW) : +11% : +1696 units
BATMAN AND #30 WONDER WOMAN (DC) : +4% : +1537 units
STAR TREK ONGOING #32 (IDW) : +10% : +1020 units
Doesn't seem to be any particular reason for these small increases, other than WALKING DEAD is coming off some good numbers for the TV show season finale, there's a new TMNT movie coming out soon and Wonder Woman is probably more popular than Aquaman, the previous guest star in BATMAN AND...". Got nothing for TREK.

X-FILES SEASON 10 #11 (IDW) : +8% : +958 units
This starts a storyline that sees some callbacks to the TV show (Krycek, Lone Gunmen), so that might account for the modest increase in orders.

MAXX MAXXIMIZED #6 (IDW) : +16% : +738 units
This looks like a phantom increase, with #5 having had an especially large 22% drop, possibly due to some part of the print run shipping late, but not enough to make the charts this month. If you look at the sales of #4, it's more like a 5% drop per issue, which is more realistic. And all-in-all, not doing too bad for a serialized reprint of a book which was pretty readily available for a long time.

MANIFEST DESTINY #6 (IMA) : +5% : +699 units
This seems to be genuinely doing well, with increases for the last few issues and some re-orders making the charts for earlier issues recently, plus a $1 reprint of #1.  The first collection is out this month at $10, and #7 in June continues after that, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a big jump for that.

GODZILLA RULERS OF THE EARTH #11 (IDW) : +4% : +240 units

Pretty small increase, maybe just noise, or maybe indicative of the level of interest in the movie (although another company has the actual movie license).