We're working out of the new office this week, but we couldn't resist doing our little analysis.

Total dollar value of sales increased over 20% from September, reaching the highest level this year for the second month in a row. You'll note we actually needed to increase the top end on our graph here. It will be interesting to see if this is the normal yearly cycle or if things are on an actual growth trend. Avengers/JLA #2 was still over the million dollar mark, but just barely. Amazing Spider-Man #500 helped balance out the loss from Batman, bringing in more sales than Batman #619. Obviously, Marvel should implement a policy of incrementing issue numbers by 50 to increase sales.

Sales across the board seemed stronger, with the drastic increase in overall sales not being accountable for by any single release. Certainly the debut of Hulk Gray and Teen Titans/Outsiders Secret Files helped bring in another half million, but it actually seems like new dollars were brought in instead of just a shifting from one title to another.

Cerebus jumped by about 5,000 more issues sold, increasing sales by about a factor of 5 for the new issue. (Including reorders, the total number of Cerebus issues sold for the month was up about %25). Perhaps this is the real cause of the industry-wide growth?

The graphic novel side was helped out by the continuing sales of Sandman Endless Nights. Take that away and GN sales were flat compared to September. Because of its dominance in September, though, that means there were more strong titles this month from a diverse set of things like 3 DC Archives, Transformers, Life Eaters, and Trigun all over $100,000 in sales.

Here are the raw totals for October:

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.