Two possibilities: people are finally getting tired of the ever-changing status-quo that remains unexplored before being changed yet again. Or just more and more people are waiting for the trade and therefore not supporting the single issues. It’s probably a mixture of both, and if the loss of sales in singles results in a bigger amount of sales in tpb’s, then no problem. But if it doesn’t, then despite the overall better picture (add all the books together and they do fine thanks to the regular new series with high numbers like Thor and Ultimates 3), they’re not managing to hang on to a large chunk of their audience.

No doubt retailers will order LOTS of Secret Invasion though. They always do. But as the numbers show, in the end it’s hack-and-slash again, trying to keep up with reader apathy.

IIRC that was a magazine reprint and not a digest. They also did this with “X-Men: First Class” and two other titles.

And yes, “X-Men: First Class #6″ was re-shipped even without retailers complaining about damaged copies (at least we didn’t complain/notice ’cause apparently our copies were okay).

And Marvel also shipped a sh!tload of “Fallen Son: Iron Man” as promotional copies to retailers.

Could this be a variant cover? Jeph Loeb was at a local con over the weekend, and it seemed like every artist in attendance was given a copy with a white box for sketches, I think by ACTOR/HERO INITIATIVE as a fundraiser.

Dan Slott is writing an incredible book over in Avengers: Init. Maybe he should just take over Marvel Comics Presents, fold Initiative in there, and let Slott write the Marvel Universe. And don’t forget to drop that $4 price point; it is killing everything it touches.

–ALL of our copies of X-Men: First Class #6 were misprinted, and subsequently replaced. Presuming everybody’s was misprinted, that would certainly, as Paul notes, account for the weird sales figure.

–In December Diamond sent us piles of stuff we didn’t need or order (”as a bonus,” I’m told), random trades like Runaways Digest v.2 and fresh piles of that Marvel Zombies OHotMU, which I already had too many of. I shrugged and put them out on the rack, which I imagine is what happened at Paul’s store as well. There was no real “demand,” we were just given a whole bunch extra.

> A bit underwhelming for an original Avengers story. But then again, it
> doesn’t feature the regular creators.

From what I understand, Marvel were actually very pleased with the numbers on this one, given that it was a $5 dollar book and featured a whole bunch of us new-to-marvel writer types.

The Annual is a bannered Secret Invasion: Infiltration issue. The core title isn’t.

RE: BP
> A lot of Initiative books have gone into decline over the last few months, but BLACK PANTHER is in freefall. I would never have anticipated that sales would fall this fast. Given the fate of THE ORDER, this book must be in some danger.

As I posted last month, this is just resuming the pre-Storm/CW/Initiative trend.