We're totally doing this every month now. A Marketshare-Per-Capita chart. The usual comics industry marketshare shows how much share of the overall market a comics publisher has. This divides it by the number of titles they publish in that month.

We've already looked at publisher marketshare in the North American direct market of comic book shops for May 2019,. And we just ran the top 500 ordered comics and graphic novels for the month.

But if you divide the marketshare by the number of individual titles published that month, you get a different picture. In May, Marvel published 154 comics, graphic novels to DC's 93 and Image's 61.

DC Comics soundly beats Marvel.

Now, in January, Marvel still beat DC on both counts, in February, DC had a greater retailer marketshare per item distributed than Marvel, though brought in less revenue and in March, DC Comics dominated both, more in sales than revenue. In April, Marvel swung this round again, leading DC over marketshare per capita both in dollars raised and items sold. But in May, DC swung that around, taking a dramatic lead in both.

What flavour Albatross?

Dynamite outperformed into fifth place behind Dark Horse. And Albatross Funnybooks, publishers of Eric Powell's titles, are getting good orders even if they only have a few titles, and so have a better performance-per-book than Premiere publisher Boom Studios. And Antarctic Press rose to beat both Oni Press and Valiant on this measure. It is worth still mentioning that this also includes Marvel's dollar line of True Believers reprints adding to the numbers of titles published which can skew numbers a bit.

I hope this, as ever, is a conversation point.

Publisher Retail Marketshare Per Capita x1000 Dollar Marketshare Per Capita x1000 DC COMICS 303 415 MARVEL COMICS 263 258 IMAGE COMICS 112 90 DARK HORSE 73 42 DYNAMITE 77 65 IDW PUBLISHING 66 54 ALBATROSS FUNNYBOOKS 66 46 BOOM! STUDIOS 63 50 ANTARCTIC PRESS 62 44 ONI PRESS 60 40 VALIANT 52 59 AFTERSHOCK COMICS 49 49 ACTION LAB ENTERTAINMENT 42 35 VIZ MEDIA 41 14 TITAN COMICS 37 27 ARCHIE COMICS 35 31

And here are the full stats for comparison…