Below you'll find the sales estimates for comics and trade paperbacks sold in the direct market for June, 2011. The sales numbers below are estimates based on the information provided by Diamond Comics Distributors earlier this month. Sales estimates for May, 2011 can be found here.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when reading this data. These numbers are just estimates for the sales through Diamond to direct market retailers. It does not include any sales outside of the Diamond channel such as newstands, book stores or overseas markets. Since the majority of habitual comic book readers are served through this sales channel, these numbers are a good indicator of the core sales trends at the retail level. While not all copies will sell to readers, each retailer is buying what they think they can sell so the trends at the retail level should be a close enough reflection of the sales trends at the reader level for the purposes of discussion.

The breakdowns are for just the top comics and top trades listed below. These are not the overall market share. I only deal with numbers that I can see and kick around in my ever evolving number crunching system. Sometimes the numbers get a bit battered and bruised in the process.

The estimated total sales for the 300 comics was 6,015,091 comics which is up by 872,126 units from May and down by 102,344 units from June 2010. Marvel Comics had the largest percentage of the top 300 comics with 47.13% of the total units sold followed by DC Comics with 36.16%.

The top selling comic from Marvel Comics was "Ultimate Comics Spider Man" #160 in slot 1 with an estimated 159,355 units and for DC Comics was "Flashpoint" #2 in rank 3 with an estimated 87,505 units.

The estimated total sales for the 300 trades was 330,068 trades which is up by 37,565 units from May and down by 43,508 units from June 2010.

Topping the trades list in June was "Walking Dead v14: No Way Out" by Image Comics with 20,397 units.