In a bit of a hurry this week, but I wanted to get this up quickly. Overall, it looks like a positive month for retailers.

Total dollar value of sales increased about 14% from August, reaching the highest level this year. It is 6% higher than the year's previous best month, July. Both comics and graphic novels reached the highest totals for the year.

On the graphic novel side, Sandman: Endless Nights accounted for over 22% of sales by itself. The Batman Illustrated by Neal Adams book accounted for over 8% of sales. For comparison, the top grosser in August, Batman Hong Kong accounted for a little over 7% of sales. To find another title over 10% you have to go back to April, when the Hellboy art of Mike Mignola reached just over 10%. The Sandman hardcover was a phenominally succesful book.

On the comics side, JLA/Avengers #1 was also quite succesful, doing over $1 million. This is slightly over twice what 1602 #1 grossed last month. The real surprise, though, may be the jump in sales on Batman, up 58% over last month.

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.