While the monthly comic book unit sales chart usually comes and goes without much incident, April’s recently released stats from Diamond Comic Distributors have caused some confusion over which comic book was actually the top seller. Marvel Comics’ Secret Empire #0 sits atop the chart, which writer Nick Spencer took as reason to celebrate on Twitter , but after taking a closer look, that book was actually outsold by two others from DC Comics.

Art by Jason Fabok. (DC Comics)

Art by Jason Fabok. (DC Comics)

April saw the start of “The Button” crossover between Batman and The Flash solo books, picking up on the juicy Watchmen plot seeded in last year’s best-selling DC Universe: Rebirth #1. Special lenticular (a term for those 3D images that change when you tilt them) variant covers were made for Batman #21 and The Flash #21, bumping the price up from $2.99 to $3.99.Diamond normally reports sales of variant covers under the same line item because they all cost the same (for example, Secret Empire #0 had four different covers all with the same price), but the new price point caused a second entry to be created for both Batman #21 and The Flash #21, one for the regular cover and one for the lenticular cover. This resulted in Batman #21 taking both the #2 and #7 spots and The Flash #21 taking the #5 and #11 spots for April.

John Jackson Miller over at Comichron crunched the numbers to get sales estimates for each book, so if you take the lenticular and regular cover sales for Batman #21 (130,216 + 89,256) and The Flash #21 (107,037 + 67,766), then the true totals are 219,472 for Batman and 174,803 for Flash, putting them ahead of Secret Empire’s 162,718.

Yes, you could argue that it was the popularity of the lenticluar covers that put Batman and The Flash over the prologue to Marvel's summer event, but gimmicky variants have long been a tool used to boost sales and interest in big comics (again, Secret Empire had four different covers on this issue alone). Besides, a comic breaking 100,000 units is considered a healthy success, so it doesn’t really matter where they finish in the sales horse race, but when it comes to the true winners, Batman and Flash get the bragging rights over Secret Empire.

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This is also a good time to remind you that Diamond’s sales reports are a strange beast that aren’t as clear-cut as you’d imagine. They don’t report actual comics sold, but rather the number of comics (counted as units) ordered by comic book retailers to be sold in their specialty shops. So some of those Batman lenticular covers could still be sitting on the shelf unsold and it would still count on the sales chart. It’s also worth noting Diamond’s report doesn’t take into account comics sold outside of speciality shops nor does it include digital sales. Still, because the publishers keep their actual sales data a secret, the Diamond report remains the only way to track how books are selling, however abstract the data may be.

Credit to THR's Graeme McMillan for first articulating this issue.Joshua is IGN’s Comics Editor. If Pokemon, Green Lantern, or Game of Thrones are frequently used words in your vocabulary, you’ll want to follow him on Twitter @JoshuaYehl and IGN