February sales were up about 3% from January, but graphic novel sales accounted for the smallest percentage of the total revenues since Diamond began reporting actual sales last March.

TPB/GN revenue decreased its share to less than 11% of total revenue, bringing in the lowest total revenues since we started tracking these numbers. DC had the only 3 titles to break the $100,000 mark with Adam Strange Archives 1, Shazam Archives 4, and Lovecraft HC. Marvel's New X-Men 6 sold the most copies but it's lower cover price pushed it down to number 5 on total revenue. Marvel's best book for revenue was Essential Punisher 1. Crossgen's return to TP publishing seems to have picked up right where it left off, with Sojourn 4 selling exactly 1 copy more than Sojourn 3 sold last May (and at a higher cover price!). Manga's top revenue generator this month was Viz's Rurouni Kenshin 3, which is only 28th on the revenue chart.

On the comics side 1602 continued its run at the top of the total revenue list, although Secret War 1 debuted at number 2. Pulitzer Prize winning novels don't translate into lots of direct market sales, apparently, as Michael Chabon Presents Adventures of the Escapist 1 debuted at number 64, although that did place it higher than all but the Sleeper issue of Coup d'Etat.

Diamond also began reporting the top 100 graphic novels for the month. As ICv2 noted, the 51 - 100 positions accounted for 28% of the revenue of the top 100, which is a substantial amount. We will keep looking at the top 50 numbers here so we can keep comparing the to previous months, but once we have a few more months of top 100 data we will start including it in our data here. Why Diamond can't stick to a reporting methodology for an entire year is strange to me, but I am glad to have more data available.

Here are the raw totals for February:

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.