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Comics from Europe! The latest offerings from Cinebook and Humanoids! Darwin! Mœbius! Milo Manara's Golden Ass! Zombies! John the Baptist!

Marc-Oliver can tell you how the actual sales levels of the DC relaunch are, but let's take a look at a slightly different metric: how do the relative popularity of the "New 52" compare to the way that retailers initially ordered them? With November's sales estimates, we see orders where the retailers had a chance to see how the #1's moved and potentially the #2's in some cases, before the cutoff dates for adjusting orders.

How Sony, Ikea and DC Comics approach marketing to women. Hint: only one of these companies actually tried.

QtyRank Dollar Rank Index DESC_1 PRICE VendName 1 1 105.11 JUSTICE LEAGUE #3 $3.99 DC 2 4 100.00 BATMAN #3 $2.99 DC 3 3 89.33 ACTION COMICS #3 $3.99 DC 4 7 81.23 GREEN LANTERN #3 $2.99 DC 5 9 75.08 POINT ONE #1 $5.99 MAR 6 5 74.28 AVENGING SPIDER-MAN #1 $3.99 MAR 7 6 72.80 UNCANNY X-MEN #1 $3.99 MAR 8 8 66.28 DETECTIVE COMICS #3 $2.99 DC 9 11 59.89 FLASH...

Over at the Books-A-Million website, on the magazines page, DC's "New 52" is being highlighted. "Action Comics," "Justice League" and "Batgirl" are rotating in the middle slot at the top of the page, sandwiched between magazines like "Vogue" and Maxim. At the bottom of the page, filed under "special interests" are Batman, Action, Batgirl, Wonder Woman, Detective, Supergirl, Green Lantern Corps and Batman & Robin.

Although Edna Mode famously cried "No capes!" people can't seem to get enough of them these days, with capelets and mini capes among the outerwear options for fall and beyond. But if you need capes on all your extremities, these Superman socks with attached capes will get you flying down the street. According to the seller, they are for schoolgirls, but they go up to Women's size 9, so a variety of ages and sizes can get in on the fetish fun. Usually, however, it is males who get socks for Christmas since there is little giftable that can be purchased for them. Maybe these are a comedy option for the BIg Bang Theory types in your household?

October was a first litmus test for the good "New 52" relaunch numbers, as it was the first month that allowed retailers to react to customer feedback on DC's "New 52" initiative in a meaningful way. As a result, Marvel won a little less of the market share than usual got really spanked by DC in October, which took the Top 6 spots, along with a whopping 17 out of the Top 20 (and 32 out of the Top 50, and 60 out of the Top 100), as well as 50.97 percent of the unit market share and 42.47 percent of the dollar share. DC's average periodical numbers were down a bit from September and are now in the exact same area as right after the line-wide "One Year Later" event in May 2006, which had been DC's high-water mark before the current relaunch. Back then, the average new DC comic book (not counting the now-defunct WildStorm) sold an estimated 50,519 units, the average new DC Universe comic book 59,505. In October 2011, now, it's 51,280 and 59,146, respectively. These numbers don't suggest we need to build a new ball park quite yet, but DC certainly did a great job of filling up the old one in a way that hasn't happened since, well, 2006. While a slight drop-off from September was to be expected, it turns out to be very slight indeed, because 16 of the "New 52" titles didn't drop at all, but rather increased in sales. They're led by Animal Man, which, on the back of good reviews, saw an impressive second-issue increase of 16 percent. And even most of the rest of the bunch displays much slighter drops than we're used to, for that matter. Only 16 of the percentage drops are in the double digits, and only four of those -- Action Comics, Men of War, Superman and Blackhawks -- are in the area you'd usually suspect. As a result, the average second-issue drop for the "New 52" is a tiny 5.2 percent -- a dream figure by any standard. (Also, it's worth noting that many of the books with the bigger second-issue drops came out in the last week of October. Technically, this means that they were disadvantaged, because all subsequent re-orders slipped into November. On the other hand, the first issues of those titles shipped in the last week of September, too, of course, so it should have evened out. In any case, we'll get a clearer picture of what's going on with the November chart.)

Rather than putting out all its solicitation information at once, Marvel prefers to parcel it out to various sites, so info on February's releases is drifting out here and there...and among them, more cancellations.

Over on their blog, DC has announced the rollout for the New 52 collections. Instead of dumping 52 trades in one month, they will be staggered from May-November, with 7 or 8 books released a month. Justice League, Batman, Green Lantern, Detective, Batman & Robin, Batgirl, Batwoman, Batman: The Dark Knight, Aquaman, Green Lantern Corps, Green Lantern: New Guardians, Action, Superman and Flash are all getting hardcovers; the rest get TPBs. Missing from the list: Wonder Woman.

September was business as usual for DC Comics' periodical sales, as... oh, wait. The "New 52" project, a relaunch of its complete superhero line via 52 #1 issues, made September 2011 a record-breaking month for DC Comics -- and a joyously eventful one for the people watching their sales. It's not often that publishers attempt something on this scale, unfortunately, so it's nice not to come up with 52 different ways of expressing that sales have mostly been going down, for a change. It's a little bit like that myth about Eskimos and the words they have for snow. Anyway: The average DC comic book sold an estimated 57,224 units in September, the average DC Universe comic book a whopping 67,411 units. That's more than double what it was in August for both, as well as more than in any previous month since sole distributor Diamond started releasing information on actual sales to specialty retailers in March 2003. The month that comes closest is May 2006, when DC's line-wide "One Year Later" initiative kicked off, with 44,554 (DC total) and 59,505 (DC Universe) units, respectively. And, while we're breaking records: May 2006 was also the only previous time when the total dollar value of DC's periodical comic books exceeded 10 million, with an estimated $10,157,965. In September 2011, the amount was $10.9 million for DC total and $10.5 million for the DC Universe line, which never broke the 10-million mark on its own before. (Average cover prices were about the same, by the way: $3.05 for DC total and $3.04 for DC Universe in 2006, and vice versa in 2011.)

What the heck, everyone else does it. A XOMBI collection with all five issues of the John Rozum/Frazer Irving romp and GONE TO AMERIKAY, the Derek McCulloch/Colleen Doran GN about the Irish immigration would top our wish list. Lots o' fill-ins in the New 52 creatives as deadlines take their toll. But it was all in the plan.

As you may have heard, DC had this relaunch thing going on in September, ending several months of deck-clearing and water-treading in the company's superhero line. The kick-off came in the last week of August, with the release of Geoff Johns and Jim Lee's Justice League #1, which -- to nobody's surprise -- leads the August charts by quite a margin. To gauge what this means in the broader context of the comic-book direct market, though, we'll have to go back a few years.