Sixteen Years of Purchases

I'm stealing this from Gary at Crisis on Earth-Prime, who did this last month. Little graphical breakdown of my comic buying habits, since 2006, roughly when this blog started. Everything is in total number of comics purchased, I didn't want to make a second graph for percentages. You can click on it if you want to get a better look. Probably have to, actually.

 

As far as total across all publishers, 2006 and 2020 are the outliers, albeit in opposite directions. I thought 2007 would be as well, but I did one of those box and whisker, quartile graphs to check and, nope, it is right on the edge, but it's in. It's mostly been a slow downward trend, especially from 2008 to 2018, when it only went from 144 to 114. That's only about three fewer books a year. The last few years have been a little more chaotic. Total went up in 2019, then 2020's global clusterfuck, and then last year.

Marvel leads the pack every year. Usually the majority, but not always, and not often recently (see 2018-2020). Still, I think the smallest gap between #1 and #2 is ~17%, and that was in 2020. 2006 and 2007 are outliers, the only years Marvel's total exceeds 105 (exceeds it by a lot both years). Reviewing comics on this blog and realizing certain titles were disappointing me month after month did help me cut down on the excess. There's also 2020, again in the other direction. Marvel seems to hover in certain ranges for a while, then shift sharply. Three of the last four years, Marvel's been in the low-to-mid 50s. Before that, three years in a row in the low 70s. Couldn't tell you why that happens, just seems to go that way.

In that sense, 2014 is an outlier, too, at 101 comics (and just under 79%, next highest percentage after '06 and '07.) The 4 years prior went 79-70-64-80, and the next three were 74-73-72. Then right smack in the middle, one year where Marvel published a bunch of stuff I was willing to at least try, right before they canceled everything because of Hickman's Secret Wars.

DC's usually in second, although again, not so much lately. IDW got the silver in 2016, Boom! in 2018-2019, and Scout last year. DC peaked in 2010, the last full year before their big New 52 reboot, and they've been dropping pretty much ever since. 2015 was the last year DC averaged 2 books/month, and 2017 and 2020 are the only years since where it was even 10% of the total.

So if Marvel's cut has dropped, and DC's is down to almost nothing, the difference is going to all the other publishers, right? Yeah, pretty much. Their percentage went above 40% in 2018, and hasn't dropped below it since. Non-Marvel/DC comics made up over half of the total in 2019 and 2020. But I'm not sure individual publishers are getting much more, because I'm buying stuff from so many more companies now.

In the first 11 years of this blog, the highest number of non-Marvel/DC publishers I bought from was 5, in 2009. That was a grand total of 14 comics. In 2012 and 2013, when I bought 33 and 23 comics from those publishers, it was from three companies (Dark Horse, IDW, Red 5). It's only in the last few years I've really branched out and started scouring the Previews catalog for anything that looks good. But in a lot of cases, I'm buying one title from that company. So you get 2021, where I bought 51 comics that weren't from Marvel or DC, but they're divided among 10 companies. Nobody's really getting a big percentage.

Beyond that, it's mostly just interesting to see companies pop up, in some cases become the major player among the second or third-tier, then drop off the map for years. Boom! was a big deal in 2010-2011, then I didn't buy anything from them again until 2017. It was even beating out DC for a couple of years, actually had the best two years of any non-Marvel/DC company. Almost broke 20% in 2018. Now they're nowhere, because I'm not interested in Buffy comics or Power Rangers. 

Red 5 was doing very well from 2011-2014, then Atomic Robo switched to IDW, and viola! Nothing from Red 5 until White Lily last year. Scout and Vault have been doing OK the last few years, but who knows how long that'll last. Especially for Scout, which hasn't actually shipped any of the comics that were supposed to come out this year. Life on the fringes is volatile like that.