The sky is falling, in case you hadn’t heard.

Well, the ceiling in the direct market seems to be, at any rate, although DC seems less affected by that right now than Marvel.

DC starts the new year with numbers that aren’t stellar, but then again, they rarely are in January. And compared to January 2009, DC’s overall unit and dollar sales are slightly up, even. For the DC Universe line, dollar sales are down compared to last year’s, but that’s because Blackest Night was on a skip month, whereas January 2009 saw two issues of Final Crisis. At Vertigo, there was a slight increase in average unit sales, if nothing else, thanks to the debut of Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy’s Joe the Barbarian, another comic book that was two thirds a promotional item and came with a $ 1.00 cover price.

WildStorm, on the other hand, once again lowered the bar for its worst unit and dollar sales in history. In January 2009, the previous low point, the imprint’s estimated comic-book unit sales in the direct market were 95,910 (6,851 on average), with dollar sales of 310,353. In January 2010, it was 71,847 (6,532) and 241,809, respectively. Bluntly, WildStorm has to be selling a whole lot of comics outside the direct market for this not to be an utter disaster.