One thing that won't be changing anytime soon is our bizarre fascination with the data we have to analyze the Direct Market. And January does not look good.

TPB/GN revenue increased its share ever so slightly to account for 12% of total revenue. Superman Red Son was the clear leader for the month, with Trigun 2 and the Wonder Woman Archives 4 being the only other titles to break the $100,000 level.

On the comics side, Ultimate Fantastic Four #2 still performed well but 1602 continued its run at the top of the total revenue list. DC was successful with its strategy of pricing DC New Frontier at $5.95, pushing it above Uncanny X-Men in terms of revenue even though it was selling about as well as Thor and Silver Surfer. Most everyone's revenues were down for January, except for things like New X-Men shipping 2 issues in the month (more than making up for December's high revenue due to the higher cover price).

While it is a 20% drop in sales from December, ICv2 claims it is less than average drop for that time of year. So, I guess we'll see.

Only two more months until we can do year over year comparisons! There will be plenty of interesting data to look through at that point if we can find enough research time.

Here are the raw totals for January:

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.