Sales To Astonish #16 – Dec 2023 Comic Market Report
Welcome to Sales to Astonish, a new column in association with comics retailer The Unreality Store, in which Matthew De Monti brings us news on comic sales and the general moves in the comic market over the past month or so!
At the risk of it sounding a little like a repeat of last year (has anyone been reading these reports that long?), December is always an odd time for an online retailer. There clearly comes a point where whatever postal or shipping service you use cannot get the gift someone needs ahead of the festive day so there always tends to be a bit of a drop off around 20/21st December and as predicted on 21st December I had another day with 0 sales.
However, this year I had the benefit of stocking three retail outlets which hopefully would mean people visiting them had the opportunity to buy something in person right up to Christmas Eve and mitigate against the online drop-off – this was evidenced by a sale of a Dungeons & Dragons Ravenloft boxed set in Vintage Guru for £75 on the same day where internet orders disappeared.
Although there was a slight drop off in sales as anticipated, generally the first couple of weeks in December were busy online. Whilst this might be due to seasonal fluctuations, December did see an increase in overall traffic to the website which was really pleasing. The more visitors, the greater the chance that someone will find something of interest to read or fill a gap in their collection. In a year where Comicana Direct closed their site, it appears there are precious few dedicated back-issue comic websites in the UK (30th Century Comics, Silveracre and Luckytargetcomics are those that immediately spring to mind) so I’m pleased that I have reached the end of another year with website traffic on the increase.
On Sunday 17th December I attended the Comic Con does Christmas show run by Striking Events at Northampton. Whilst I had already decided to ‘retire’ from Cons & Fairs, this one is only 20 minutes down the road, I’d done well there previously in the year so it seemed like a no-brainer. I took boxes of £1 comics, comic sets and was offering graphic novels at 3 for £20. The doors opened and people dribbled in – a far cry from the hordes that attended in March & August. By midday it was apparent that people were probably Christmas shopping elsewhere and the gruellingly slow hours between 12-4 are some that I will never get back. Thankfully I didn’t make a loss!! My lasting memory of the day will be of the two forlorn Reindeer cooped up outside the sports centre looking as bored as I had been.
On Boxing Day I ran a 24-hour flash sale to people who subscribe to the weekly email newsletter. To say I was staggered by the response would be an understatement and to put things into perspective I took more money on Boxing Day than I did in the entire month of April 2023. It took me over three days to package everything up and get the comics, graphic novels and roleplaying games out to new homes
There was time for one last release at the end of December and most of the Venom issues from a collection of 90’s mini-series sold within the day. I think these have been slightly overlooked in preference to the hype of the last 2 years over the Donny Cates run on the character but I have no doubt that if I got replacement issues back in stock they would sell again. And again
New Year’s Eve was quiet and I watched The Killer on Netflix. Based on an Archaia comic (reprinted from the French? original) it was a real slow burn. In fact, it never really ignited and seemed like a bit of a vanity project for Fassbender. I really enjoyed the comic and the follow which weren’t full of action but were expertly paced, up so perhaps this was one of those times when the story is best left in the medium it originated in.
