Paul O'Brien writes:

Crossover season continued in June, with SECRET INVASION and its tie-ins still leading Marvel’s output. But this time round, the event hasn’t completely taken over Marvel’s output. There’s also the heavily promoted ULTIMATE ORIGINS series, and two new ongoing titles: SKAAR, SON OF HULK and ETERNALS.

As usual, Marvel had the dominant share of the North American direct market. If you go by Diamond’s figures, Marvel had a 48% unit share compared to DC’s 30%. In dollar terms, their lead was smaller but still commanding: 42% to 30%.

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However, that’s probably overstating it a bit. One of DC’s big launches for June was TRINITY, their latest weekly series. Like 52 and COUNTDOWN before it, the early issues of TRINITY are being sold to stores on a returnable basis. Diamond’s policy, in compiling the charts, is to reduce the sales by some unspecified amount to allow for this.

In theory this is perhaps fair enough, but in practice, 52 and COUNTDOWN both supposedly saw their sales bounce up when the first non-returnable issue shipped. The obvious inference is that Diamond is being excessively pessimistic in allowing for returns, and that TRINITY probably sold significantly better than the chart shows - with the consequence that DC’s market share is probably at least slightly bigger than the chart makes it look.

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