First, a disclaimer: the staff here at SC is not in any way involved in the comics industry, and certainly not involved with the business side of things. So when we "analyze" these numbers we may occasionally overlook something that would be obvious to actual people in the industry. This month's example: months with 5 shipping weeks.

Total sales were down 20% from October. But, as ICv2 points out, October had 5 weeks of orders and November was back to the normal 4. This is probably a significant factor in October's strong numbers (up 20%) and the drop right back down. Although November dropped back below September's sales as well, so there was an even greater decline to account for. Looking back over the year, though, we don't see such an impact from previous 5-week months. Looking at the numbers on a quarterly basis will probably help to even things out.

All of the top titles seemed to slide, with JLA/Avengers slide down about 17% being fairly typical. 1602 didn't suffer a huge drop - only 13% - for issue number 4, despite that being the first pre-order drop point after people actually got to read an issue. Amazing Spider-Man had a huge drop after the anniversary issue.

For those of you on the deathwatch, Cerebus sales were down for the new issue, and no reorders made the top 300 this month.

The most interesting news on the TPB/GN side this month was that they accounted for over 15% of the total revenue this month, a record high for this year (at least since March). I'd expect this trend to continue for December as a result of holiday gift-purchasing, but we'll see if there is a trend beginning here.

JLA Liberty and Justice accounted for over 12% of the TPB/GN revenues this month, which is a pretty impressive accomplishment, beating out the League of Extroadinary Gentlemen Volume 2 (which I saw getting good placement in at least one Barnes and Noble, so maybe people are buying it elsewhere? Let me dream, ok?), Transmetropolitan Volume 9 (DC's apparent TPB release strategy on hit series: kill all momentum), Matrix Comics, and Joss Whedon's Fray (which probably didn't get the recognition among Buffy fans it should have). Oh what I would do to have the bookstore sales figures for comparison, not to mention the whole manga numbers that would then be available..

Anyways, here are the raw totals for November:

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.