In the comments thread for the previous post, somebody asked whether DC’s new “day and date” policy would make the sales chart meaningless.

A fair question – we won’t have access to the digital sales figures, and like any other distribution channel, they could make a big difference to the overall picture.

But (via Bleeding Cool) we do know roughly how many digital comics DC are selling right now – because Dan DiDio has been telling retailers at their promotional roadshows.

As of now, DC’s print comics outsell digital by a factor of …

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No X-Axis today (as I mentioned last time, I’m not getting the books until next week).  But since I have some spare time, here’s some more thoughts on the DCU relaunch.  Or at least vaguely related to the DCU relaunch.

I’ve looked at the individual titles before.  Now let’s think about the bigger picture.

Here’s what we know.  DC are relaunching their entire superhero universe in September, and revising continuity yet again.  Some characters remain broadly the same, some have their back stories changed, and the entire population of the WildStorm universe is being retroactively folded into DC history.  To make way for all this, a load of titles are being cancelled, and those that are continuing are wrapping up (or at least guillotining) outstanding storylines in order to make way for a clean relaunch.

So it’s a new continuity, but incorporating large chunks of the previous one.  Though we don’t really know which chunks, save for a handful of specific stories that have been mentioned in interviews.  It all sounds rather similar to 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, which similarly attempted to consolidate multiple superhero universes into one, rebooting some characters at the same time.

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Come September, DC will be relaunching the entire DC Universe with 52 new titles.  As you might have gathered, Al and I will pick up the first issue of pretty much anything, if only to review it.  But 52 in one month?  Boy, that’s a lot.

On the other hand, I’m willing to throw a bit of time and money in it for the first month, in order to give a chance to the ones that sound like they might have something to offer.

So which ones do I really want to read?  In a shameless bid to start an incredibly unwieldy comments thread, let’s go through them all and see.  (I’m working here from the list on Bleeding Cool, by the way.)

1: Justice League by Geoff Johns and Jim Lee. It’s the flagship; it’s the lynchpin for the relaunch; it’s by the two guys who are supposed to be driving the line.  It’ll probably be good, but at any rate it’ll be essential reading for industry-watchers.  That’s 1.

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I mentioned this already on Twitter, but reviews will be a couple of days late.  Haven’t got last week’s comics yet, wouldn’t have had time to read them anyway.

Fortunately!  Just one post below, you’ll find this week’s podcast, which is extra long.

Wrestling preview… maybe later tonight.  Maybe not.  We’ll have to see.

Reviews tomorrow night, I think.  Way too much other stuff keeping me away from it today…

Chances are that by the time you read this I’m back in the country.  Chances are that I’m also probably asleep.

Normal content will resume in the next couple of days.  Thank you for your patience.

In case you’re checking by for the X-Axis, a podcast or a Wrestlemania preview, just a reminder that we’re taking a short break and we’ll be back in a couple of weeks.

We’re recording the podcast tomorrow night.  Reviews probably Monday.  (There’s not much out, to be honest – two X-books and some new releases that I’m saving as candidates for the podcast.)

After last week’s deluge of X-Men titles, this week Marvel change tack to ship three Wolverine titles.  Yes, okay, one of them is Daken.   But still…

Avengers Academy #10 – Well, that’s odd.  The cover of this issue is the Academy trainees and the cast of New Avengers teaming up to fight magic thingies, with a big “Magic 101” banner over the top.  And the interior… features Hazmat spending a day off with Leech, and Speedball delivering a lesson about how he feels about the Stamford disaster from Civil War.  And that’s a perfectly good story, albeit of a rather deck-clearing sort.  It addresses the obvious question of why Hazmat doesn’t just get her hugely inconvenient powers removed for good, using one of the various well-established techniques available in the Marvel Universe for such endeavours.  And it continues the detoxification of Speedball, who’s going to require a lot of that sort of thing before he’ll be anything other than the poster child for really inane ideas, but points for trying.  What it doesn’t do… is bear the slightest resemblance to the story advertised on the cover.  Strange choice.

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I’ve got a week and a half’s worth of X-books to cover here (thanks to Diamond UK splitting the week-before-last’s shipment in two), and there’s a ton of them… so let’s get to it.  Below the cut: Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine #4, Astonishing X-Men: Xenogenesis #4, Chaos War: X-Men #1, Daken: Dark Wolverine #4, Generation Hope #3, New Mutants #20, X-23 #4, X-Men Forever 2 #14, and X-Men: To Serve and Protect #2.  Needless to say, we’ll be kind of rushing through some of these…

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