August IDW comics sales figures: a nasty surprise

If you humans don't start buying this comic again, there's going to be trouble...

It's time once again for us to take a look at how the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic comic and its associated Micro-series have been selling. As usual, the stats come from Comichron and cover North American comic shops. Last month, I was in buoyant mood after being able to note increased sales. This month... afraid not. Actually, on the face of it the figures are eye-openingly bad. Main series issue #10 came in at no. 84 — down 18 places since last month — and sold a mere:

24,475

This represents a huge drop of over thirty per cent since last month. (30.3%, in fact.) I certainly didn't expect that, especially given that we're in the middle of an extremely well-received story from the Cook/Price/Breckel all-star team. It was released very late in the month, which may have had some bearing, but no previous issue has sold less than 32,000 copies. The CMC micro didn't fare all that well either. It did creep back up to no. 100 (up three) but sales were only:

20,868

Again, a big decrease since July. At 14.3%, it's not as precipitous as the cliff that main-series sales have fallen off, but it's hardly good news even so. Again, this is substantially the worst performance by any of the seven Micro-series comics published so far. I didn't think the CMC micro was all that brilliant, but it was solid enough, on a par with the AJ issue, so it would have been nice to have seen it do better. The next issue stars Celestia, not the biggest fan favourite, so my expectations are limited.

There are some good-news stories to report, most notably that Digest #1 hit no. 6 on the graphic novels chart with sales of 4,067 beating Deadpool #2. In more conventional trade-paperback territory, the anthology collecting main-series issues #1 to #4 is still a steady seller, with another 659 this month taking the total near to 7,000. Also, the Cover Gallery made no. 240 on the main chart despite not being a comic in the usual sense. It sold 6,859 copies.

But back to the main point of this month's stats: the enormous fall in the main-series' sales. I hope nobody panics too much about this: the Pony comics remain IDW's top two sellers. And August was a fairly poor month for the industry all round, as can be seen from the micro increasing its chart position despite the fall in numbers. We'll have to wait another month to see whether this is a blip, though. I hope that I'll be able to report somewhat happier news then!