Silver Bullet Comics takes a look at the sales data from ICv2, and as you can tell, we love numbers here at SC. As usual, though, I'm a little confused by what their numbers tell us. First, they only look at the top 100, even though top 300 numbers are available. This limits the overall usefulness of the analysis because it restricts the amount of variance in the numbers. Sure, the top 100 makes up a huge majority of the data, but why place the limit unnecessarily?

Also, they analyze data back to 2001 even though data before March 2003 is only preorders, which means that year-to-year comparisons aren't quite correct. Any numbers after March 2003 should be higher because they include actual sales through Diamond, not just the initial orders. (According to ICv2, the reorders account for 4-5% of all orders for comics.)

It also seems strange to me to only look at the comics sales and not the graphic novel sales, but that may reflect my own purchasing patterns.

And, as Dirk Deppey points out, the second chart actually makes sales (as a count of total issues sold) rather flat. But I want to know is this: what does total number of issues sold tell us? I guess it could be used in some kind of "NYT Bestseller" way, but that doesn't work very well when new issues come out every month.