Marc-Oliver Frisch writes:

With Final Crisis and Batman both showing up on shelves and spawning more crossover books, August was the strongest month for DC Comics’ periodical business in quite a while. Thanks to the new high-profile spin-off titles Final Crisis: Revelations, Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds, DC Universe: Last Will and Testament and Final Crisis: Superman Beyond, and to a persistently spectacular performance of the “Batman RIP” tie-ins, average sales of the publisher’s DC Universe line rose to their highest level to date in 2008.

The average periodical numbers of DC’s Vertigo and WildStorm sublabels, meanwhile, appear to be making some small progress towards climbing out of their respective all-time lows, although you wouldn’t guess it from looking at any individual titles.

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At Vertigo, neither the new monthly series Air nor the returning Army@Love provided much in the way of ecouragement. And at WildStorm, the rest of the relaunched WildStorm Universe books turned up, making it official that the entire line is now less popular than Ambush Bug.

The North American direct market’s top-selling comic in terms of dollar-value in August 2008 was, quite remarkably, not a periodical at all, by the way. It was the Watchmen collection, first released in 1988, the latest edition of which sold an estimated 43,393 units to North American direct-market retailers in August. When a trailer for the upcoming film adaptation was shown in conjunction with The Dark Knight, demand for the book skyrocketed, apparently. So, all told, August was definitely one of DC’s better months in recent history.

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