Marvel has just cancelled “Marvel Apes: Prime Eight Special”, so they’ve presumably they’ve got the point.

1) They now have CONTINUITY, and LOTS OF IT. After all, the ENTIRE SELLING POINT of this line originally was that it was CONTINUITY-FREE, so you could just jump on right away. But now, the Ultimate line is hitting its 10-year mark, and due to some STUNNINGLY short-sighted planning, they’s actually managed to fit 40 years’ worth of continuity into 10 years’ worth of issues, by attempting to adapt every single preexisting Marvel character that they could into an Ultimate version.

2) The preexisting Marvel line IS the Ultimate line now, because as soon as the Ultimate lines got popular enough, the preexisting Marvel line poached both its most popular creators (Bendis and Millar) AND all of its most popular themes (greater “realism,” more government conspiracies, a darker atmosphere overall). Hell, thanks to Mephisto, those who simply wanted a single Spider-Man again no longer have any reason to read Ultimate Spider-Man anymore, do they? (Of course, some of us still prefer Ultimate Spider-Man, because Ultimate Peter Parker is actually more mature, and less unforgivably stupid and worthless, than adult Peter Parker in Amazing Spider-Man, but I digress.)

Really, what’s the POINT of the Ultimate line anymore? It’s no longer any more ACCESSIBLE to new readers, it’s no longer the exclusive marvel outlet for popular creators, and almost all of its stylistic trappings have been incorporated into the non-Ultimate Marvel titles, so as a line, it is 100-percent useless.

Barry Kitson has shown over then years that he is a slow artist and is not capable of doing a monthly comic. It would seem, then, that the Amazing Spider-Man format of 3 issues a month would work to his favor by allowing him to get three issues done, then soliciting the book. Apparently something mucked up the plan.

Or perhaps Marvel is just resorting to the old bait-and-switch.

July will also be a “2 issues only” month, though one of them is the oversized #600 (and there will also be an annual out that month).

Is it any wonder that sales are down on the Ulitmate line whenever their huge event can’t even bother to ship on time. It’s nothing short of pathetic that Ultimatum has fallen so far behind.

And it’s really bizarre that Marvel could not do their usual issues of 3 Amazings considering the large creative group on that title.

The Fallen Son Iron Mans were given free to retailers if they ordered copies of comics from a liquidation list. It was a one for one deal, so every liquidation comic got a copy of the Fallen Son. I guess they sold 3,529 liquidation comics.

They don’t give out spare copies. What they *do* is offer them to retailers at 50-70% off.

Which is one way to clean house.

Well, I’d argue that LEGACY isn’t the second X-Men title any longer. It may have retained the numbering, but it’s not the second X-Men title any more than INCREDIBLE HERCULES is a Hulk title. It’s more or less a solo book now, and it can’t be thought of in the same terms as a second core title for the X-Men team.

While the number of shops that each monthly chart represents would surely be interesting (and I’m slowly bringing together some data points I have across time for some earlier years), I do suspect the per-store averages would be misleading, or would need additional context. There have been times when the market had a lot more retailers at the lower discount tiers — sportscard and game-store dabblers — and then times without as many, so the average bounces around not really reflecting what the mainline stores are doing.

So having the average would be good, but even better would be something that says, in month X, 20% of the accounts sold 80% of the comics, or whatever the number is, and then we could watch that change over time. I’ve seen this kind of thing before, but only in internal documents.

Cheers,

B

I’ve been on a couple of extended road trips over the past eight weeks or so (one more to go), and been playing catch-up on everything else in-between.

My apologies, especially to Heidi and Paul. By the end of the month, things will be back to normal.

Could it be that possibly, maybe, Marvel has been building a good solid fanbase for its’ cosmic titles ever since Annihilation? Therefore, this series, written by the enjoyable team of Abnett and Lanning, is outselling the X-Crossover dejour?

Hmmmm……of course I might be biased. I don’t buy Cable or X-Force, but do pick up Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy every month.

And a good point it was. Average sales per store would be a more defining number, but it appears we will never get that information.

Please everyone, just thank Paul and Marc-Oliver for all the incredible work they put in on these charts!