Marvel Comics was the top selling comic book publisher in 2011, owning 37.29 percent of the retail market share and 40.93 percent of unit market share in 2011, according to Diamond Comic Distributors.
DC followed Marvel with 31.41 percent of the retail market share and 35.77 percent of the unit market share. Image Comics, IDW Publishing and Dark Horse Comics followed the two giants. Diamond bases its numbers on total sales of comics, graphic novels and magazines to comic book specialty stores.
Newsarama has more: “As always, Diamond’s reported sales are for products ordered by comic book retailers, and not sales made to consumers in-store. Perhaps the best overall news is while January sales were down by single digits compared to December 2011, 2012 got off to a strong start compared to last year, with January comic book sales up 33.56% over January 2011 and graphic novel sales up 8.45%, for a total +31.38% jump on Year-to-Year sales.”