Once again, I don't understand the comics news sites analysis of sales data. Let's take a look at the total dollar value of sales for the top 300 comics and top 50 graphic novels in August:

Total dollar value of sales dropped about 7% from July, putting it more in line with previous months this year. This happened despite 1602, which sold over $500,000 in August. Without doing more analysis it looks like these sales came out of the budget for other comics as opposed to attracting new sales.

Of course, for these to be meaningful we really need year-over-year data and not just month-to-month, but we'll have to keep waiting on that since actual sales have only been reported by Diamond since March. Maybe August is traditionally a slower month than July and not even Neil Gaiman can change that.

Here are the raw totals for August:

Methodology: Using ICv2's estimated sales (based on Diamond's bizarre reported sales ratio), multiplied by the cover price of the items, summed over the top 300 comics and the top 50 graphic novels.

Thanks to ICv2 for making their estimates available.