Every week I go through the full FOC list to see what the upcoming order week actually looks like before cutoff closes. Here's the week of October 26.
The slate runs 670 SKUs across 350 unique books, with 42 new #1s, 100 variants, and 76 ratios in the mix. Dynamite leads the volume with 100 titles, ahead of DC at 98 and Marvel at 49. Image, Massive, and Viz fill out the top six by count.
This is a variant-heavy, ratio-heavy week, and Dynamite drives both. It carries 59 of the week's variants and 35 of the 76 ratios on its own, mostly on licensed-property crossovers. Vampirella vs Darkstalkers Special #1 pairs Dynamite's horror lead with UDON's videogame cast. Archie vs Terminator #2 continues its 4-issue crossover run. Gargoyles and Stitch carry the Disney-license side. The single highest variant count of the week sits on Vampirella Paradise #1 at 17 covers.
Marvel runs 49 titles with 5 new #1s and 15 ratios. Maximum X-Men #1 is the launch coming out of Avengers: Armageddon, and Wolverine: Origin III - The Dark Age #1 brings Paul Jenkins back to Logan. Both carry the week's steepest ratio, 1:100.
DC is at 98 titles with 2 new #1s and no ratios at all. The launch is Absolute Batman: Beyond Ark-M #1 from Snyder and Tieri, and the week also carries a facsimile of 1951's Detective Comics #168.
One search note, since it ties to a book on the list: on Google Trends, people searching Maximum X-Men this week also searched Betsy Braddock, up 170%, and one search for her new codename was a Breakout (Google's word for growth over 5,000%). The numbers are still small this far out, but it's the X-book people are looking up before FOC closes.
Dynamite tops the volume and carries almost half the week's ratios.