Paul O'Brien writes After the chaos of the January chart, we’re back to normal in February. And it’s a pretty quiet month. For Marvel, this is a lull between crossovers. We’ve had the Spider-Man relaunch, we’ve had “Messiah Complex”, WORLD WAR HULK is way in the past, and SECRET INVASION isn’t here yet.

However, we do have a small number of new launches, two of them from Mark Millar. Firstly, he’s reunited with Bryan Hitch as the new creative team on FANTASTIC FOUR. And then there’s KICK-ASS, his creator-owned title, which is appearing under Marvel’s Icon imprint. We’ve also got the first issue of the revived X-FORCE and… well, there are some scattered minis and one-shots too. But basically, this is a month of consolidation, where we start to see how recent launches and relaunches are going to bed down.

As usual, Marvel had the biggest share of the direct market. They beat DC by 38% to 30% in dollar share, and 42% to 33% in units.

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