New York Times Graphic Books Best Seller List, April 18

The New York Times Graphic Books Best Seller List for the week of April 18 contains few surprises.

DC has a lock on the hardcover list again. Watchmen moves up two slots to the top spot, while Batman: RIP slips to second. Batman: The Killing Joke and Joker move up one spot apiece to #3 and #4. Batman: Heart of Hush drops three spots to #5. All-Star Superman, v. 2 drops two slots to #9. The Saga of Swamp Thing keeps the #10 slot. Superman: Brainiac falls out of the top 10.

Marvel manages to get two titles into the hardcover list: Marvel Zombies 3 and Civil War at #7 and 8, respectively. Good for them. Maybe they’ll set their sights on the top five next time. Random House’s lone representative, The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle, moves up three spots to #6. IDW’s Angel: After the Fall, v. 3, drops out of the top 10.

Much more instability on the trade paperback list, with five new titles. This time, there’s only four DC titles on the list: Watchmen hanging on to #1, V for Vendetta slipping two slots to #5, and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns slipping one to #7. Batman: The Long Halloween enters the chart at #9. The first volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Y: The Last Man drop from the list. For Marvel, Wolverine: Origin drops to #4 from #2, but they also get Barry Windsor-Smith’s Wolverine: Weapon X in at #10. Hooray, Wolverine movie!

Among other publishers, the big winner is IDW, which puts Star Trek: Countdown, nominally by J.J. Abrams and others, in at #2. Image’s Walking Dead, v. 9, moves up one to #6, but v. 1 drops off the list. Rounding out the list is Drawn & Quarterly’s A Drifting Life (an interesting qualifier — “this 840-page memoir chronicles family troubles and the evolution of manga from 1945 to 1960”) and Oni’s latest Scott Pilgrim, Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe. Falling off the list are The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, v. 3.

Naruto takes the top 6 manga spots and seven of the top 10; the only mystery, really, is why v. 31 makes the list when the other Narutos are v. 39-44.