So much for our theories here. Apparently the holiday shopping season was not a big one for comics retailers as sales remained relatively flat (OK, it actually dropped about 3%) in December compared to November.

TPB/GN revenue was back down to 11% of total revenue, the lowest total since Diamond started providing actual sales figures. Only Batman: Hush Vol 2 and Dark Night Strikes Again broke the $100,000 level.

On the comics side, Ultimate Fantastic Four #1 had a nice debut, but the lack of JLA/Avengers and Wolverine: The End seemed to be partially offset by the extra issues of Uncanny X-Men and X-Treme X-Men. Why Marvel doesn't put the Uncanny X-Men title on some of their other x-titles to push their sales up mystifies me. It seems like a more workable sales strategy than DC's only option, which is to get Jim Lee to draw everything.

Not a very encouraging month - we'll see if January has any surprises.

Here are the raw totals for December:

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.