JUSTICE LEAGUE is officially the best selling comic of August 2011. It easily soared passed competition in Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly sales charts, beating out Marvel's
FEAR ITSELF #5 as its main competition. Jim Lee and Geoff Johns's inaugural issue of
JUSTICE LEAGUE bodes well for the DC reboot. However, Marvel retained its market superiority with 37.4% market control.
Overall, comic sales were up 7% from July and over 17% when compared to August 2010. Much of this increase can be attributed to the marketing push from DC's reboot, which helped almost all comics reach higher numbers this month.
Although retailers expect high figures to persist, others remain skeptical. One retailer in particular had this to say:
There's always a drop off between issue #1 and 2 – for every comic book that's ever been printed that's true. We're going to be aware of that and aware of the guys who came in and bought all of them for the novelty of having all 52 comics and the collectibility of that. Now that a bunch of them have sold out quick, the prices on the secondary market will jump up too. There will be a buzz about it, but I think the #2 [orders] will be based on what we think was the sell through to customers who came in more so than the attention-seekers. I feel like almost two-thirds of the people who came in on the first day are going to come back and try the second one. We also did 25% off all month long on all these DC Comics. We ordered up higher than we expected, and it was even bigger than we expected. We sold through, and DC is very quick to get second printings coming our way, and that's exciting.
September 2011 is on pace to be another record setting month for DC, but how long can these sales keep up?