On Thursday October 22nd, Manage Comics LIVE broadcast to nearly 100 comic shops. We had a lively two hours, and answered a lot of questions. Watch the full video below, or read on with the recap!
Your shops are killing it
Adam Freeman of Prana Direct Market Solutions (and Brian's co-host on Comics Industry Insiders LIVE) opened with the state of the direct market, built on sales data from Comic Shop Assistant and Manage Comics.
The short version: comic shops are growing, and the growth is speeding up.
- Q1: up 16.5% year over year (40 stores)
- Q2: up almost 20% (68 stores)
- Q3: up 25.9% (82 stores)
The best part is who's growing. The typical shop (the median, not the average) was up 26% in Q2 and kept outpacing the big stores in Q3. Smaller shops are catching up.
Where's the money coming from? Trading cards, no surprise. But books and graphic novels are the real story: up 18%, 26%, then 34% across the three quarters. Single issues are holding a steady 10% or so. Bookstores are pulling back, and comic shops are stepping into the gap.
One more number worth sitting with: Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday together account for roughly 28% of weekly sales. If you're closed on any of those days, it's worth asking what that's costing you.
What Adam recommends:
- Make room for books. Go find your nearest IKEA. Billy bookcases are under $100 and snap together in no time.
- Treat cards as a strategy, not a sideline. Hire people who understand them.
- Protect the pull box. It's your differentiator. Those are the people who show up every single week. Take care of them.
- Compete with events, not discounts. Wednesday is already an event. Give people a reason to show up on the other days, too.
And please keep sharing your data. When Diamond went under, the industry lost a lot of the numbers it ran on. Your sales data is how shops order with confidence, how publishers plan print runs, and how new investment finds its way into the direct market.
What fans actually want: Pull Box Power Rankings
The Pull Box Power Rankings look at what fans subscribe to and pre-order across more than 80,000 Manage Comics pull box users. October's rankings drew on 371 stores. They don't tell you what publishers convinced shops to buy. They tell you what customers wanted badly enough to reserve.
October's top title was Absolute Batman, and nothing came close. Midnight Spider-Man and Absolute Wonder Woman followed, with Batman holding steady as the drumbeat underneath it all.
We also previewed our fan confidence rating: the ratio between what retailers order and what fans have reserved. Shops ordered almost double the subscriber demand on Midnight Spider-Man #1. Titles like X-Men #39 are running close to subs only. Down the road, we want to show this right when you're ordering, with a simple red/orange/green signal when you're way out of line with everyone else.
Case study: the Marvel Midnight launch
For most of its pre-order window, Midnight was flat. Scary flat. Then the last five days before final order cutoff did almost all of the work, right when Marvel's marketing hit.
A few things stood out:
- 89% of the movement came from subscriptions. Only 11% came from one-off pre-orders. Fans were committing to the series, not just issue #1.
- Resoliciting X-Men barely moved it (about 2%).
- Ashcans landed too late to make a real difference.
- The growth came from existing shops, not new stores joining the data. That was fans responding.
The lesson for publishers: getting people into stores to subscribe and pre-order is your job, and it has to start well before final order cutoff.
Quick terminology note: we're slowly moving from "FOC" to last call in customer-facing places. Everyone knows what last call means.
Comic Previews: one catalog you can trust
For 30 years there was one catalog. Then Previews ended in 2025, and the industry has gone a full year without a central place to find what's coming out.
Comic Previews is our answer. It's built on a catalog rebuilt from the ground up on the COMET standard, with 128 comic-specific data fields (up from 76 generic ones). Every cover gets its own page. Fans can subscribe or pre-order from any of them, and cover swapping is coming soon.
Comic Previews is the consumer brand. Your customers see Comic Previews and your shop's name. Manage Comics stays behind the counter, doing the work.
We're also adding weekly, data-driven content like Creator Watch, plus watch lists for creators and publishers. That's the shift from pull to push: instead of fans hunting for the next Ignition book, it comes to them. If your customers build their lists there, you sell more.
Manage Comics 3.0 is live
This is the big one. It's a total rebuild, aimed at nearly every quality-of-life pain point you've told us about.
You don't need Shopify anymore. 3.0 runs standalone with RMH support today. Lightspeed is next, Shopify support comes after that, and more point-of-sale systems are on the list. We're POS agnostic. Bring your own.
Here's what's new:
- A real dashboard. Subscribers, recent activity, orders, and requests on one screen.
- Ranked distributors. Set your order of preference and see everything you can order from the distributors you use.
- Your own shop inbox. Each shop gets an email address inside Manage Comics. Replies to pre-order emails land there and on the customer's record. You can see if an email was delivered, opened, clicked, or bounced.
- Built-in email. Last call emails, Wednesday pull list notices (with an override if your books arrive late), shop news, and a morning digest of yesterday's changes. Think MailChimp, built for comics.
- Price-change tracking. Customers are notified of new prices, and you see whether they accepted or declined.
- Individual staff logins with full event tracking, so you know who approved what.
- A storefront you control. Colors, logo, layout, which series get featured, and a blog. Built-in contrast checks keep it accessible.
- Self-serve pull lists. Shops that put pull lists in customers' hands have seen subscriptions rise 20 to 30%.
- Rebuilt help. 71 new guides, 10 short tutorial videos, and a help link on every page that's specific to that page.
- Easier imports from Comic Shop Assistant, Comic Suite, and others.
- Smarter last call. A dedicated page, one-click start, and a running total of how much you're spending beyond what's already pre-sold.
- Safer merges. Merging customers no longer hard-deletes anything.
- Faster support. Our team can get into your account directly, and everything we change is logged as us, not you.
The admin now lives at app.managecomics.com.
Coming next: a support inbox, smarter subscriptions that carry over to relaunches, a catalog assistant, card-on-file payments through Stripe, and eventually selling your in-stock inventory on your storefront.
Pricing: the same as today's Manage Comics for now. Email costs us real money at scale, so we'll watch usage. We expect pricing to stay within $10 a month of what you pay now.
Tools for publishers
Everything we build for publishers helps you, because the earlier publishers get good information out, the easier it is for your customers to find what they want.
Publishers will be able to:
- Track demand from solicitation to delivery, so they can spot a Midnight-style stall early and fix it before last call.
- Get flagged when their data is wrong. Between 10% and 20% of first-week data is broken. When a publisher fixes it, we push the fix to every distributor carrying that product. A healthy industry matters more to us than hoarding data.
- Add trailers and five-page previews directly to product pages.
Publishers can join the waitlist at managecomics.com/publishers.
How to move to 3.0
Migrations start next week, and we're going slowly at first on purpose. We want to get onboarding right while we build tools so you can switch on your own.
- On RMH, or using Shopify only for subscriptions? Move sooner rather than later.
- Using Shopify for billing? Hang tight until Shopify support lands.
- On the current version? It keeps running alongside 3.0 for now. We aim to have everyone moved by January.
Questions? Email help@managecomics.com, or join about 80 retailers in the Manage Comics Discord at managecomics.com/discord. Max holds office hours there every Thursday at 1:00 PM Eastern (10:00 AM Pacific).
Thanks to everyone who joined us live, and a huge thanks to our beta shops. Your feedback shaped this release.