Canberra local comic store Impact Comics has released their top selling lists for the year 2018, including their Top 100 Superhero trade paperbacks / books, and their Top 100 All comic books. From a Phantom phan's point of view, these lists make very interesting reading!
In exciting news for Frew Publications, their two books For Those Who Came In Late and The Man Who Cannot Die (also known as the 70th Anniversary Special) featured prominently in both lists.
While many phans may be a little chagrined to hear our hero classified in this way, each of the TPBs featured prominently in the Best Selling Superhero books, and in fact were both in the top 15 for the year which is a huge achievement.
Incredibly For Those Who Came In Late was released back in 2017 and achieved fourth place on their list. What is even more amazing is that even though The Man Who Cannot Die was only released in September and would have only had four months in their store, it was still successful enough to jump into twelfth!
Have a look here for the full list and consider the books that the Phantom out-performed. These include Wonder Woman, Flash, Guardians of the Galaxy and Deadpool which all have movies and TV shows to help their popularity. Only three other books in the top 12 are brand new 2018 releases: Dark Knights Metal, Batman White Knight & Marvel's Infinity War Prelude.
Impact Comics also released their top 150 sales for All books, which includes manga, science fiction, children's books and popular fantasy series like Saga and Walking Dead. Impressively, against all-comers For Those Who Came In Late was 28th and The Man Who Cannot Die was 59th.
While these results are only for this one local comic store in Impact Comics, if you add this to anecdotal reports we have received from comic books stores around Australia, it seems that phans, comic buyers and casual readers are buying the trade paperbacks in droves.
We do not have exact numbers sold for each trade paperback directly by Frew or any other online sources, but this is a great result for Frew and would seem to justify the move into the production of these full-colour themed volumes.
We are very much looking forward to Frew's next trade paperback. As divulged in a past podcast by writer Dale Maccanti we are likely to see at least two in 2019, apparently including the Red Dragon saga.
Stay tuned later in the week as we continue to reveal results from the 2018 year, with full results from the phan survey run by ChronicleChamber in conjunction with Frew on the way!
Thanks to long-time ChronicleChamber and personal friend Luke Geaghan for spotting Impact Comics' Top Sellers list.
