Marc-Oliver Frisch writes:

In May, DC Comics finally awoke from their year-long beauty sleep. Unfortunately, they seem to be getting up on the wrong side of the bed. The good news, now, is that the first two chapters of the much-hyped “Batman RIP” storyline made the Top 10. The bad news, as you may have heard, is that Final Crisis, the big blockbuster title they’d been building towards for the past two years, didn’t quite debut in the top slot. See below for an explanation. Apart from the two major projects, DC also launched another bunch of miniseries in May, none of which registered very high on the charts. May was also th first month in two years in which there was no weekly title from the company, so, perhaps not surprisingly, sales of the average DC periodical were slightly down from April, Final Crisis and “Batman RIP” notwithstanding.

With its remake of the old House of Mystery title, Vertigo saw its highest-selling ongoing series launch in almost four years. Due to a long tail of books selling below the 10,000 mark, though, this didn’t have much of an effect on the imprint’s average periodical sales. Over at the WildStorm sublabel, meanwhile, May was a disastrous month for periodicals. Because the WildStorm Universe line of superhero series kept tanking badly and only one of three new limited series based on licensed or creator-owned properties debuted with sales above 10,000 units, average WildStorm periodical numbers declined by almost twenty percent in May, dropping to a terrifying 9,812 copies - a new all-time low for the imprint.

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