Beyond sweeping a perfect 10 out of the month’s Top 10 comic books, DC’s “New 52″ titles are also starting to show first signs of stabilization in January. The average “New 52″ title dropped 7.4% in sales, down from 17.4% in December and 19.6% in November.

This gives reason to be cautiously optimistic on the longer-term prospects of DC’s relaunched line. The trend should be taken with a grain of salt, however, as DC made a number of changes to its various retailer incentives in January that may be affecting sales one way or another. On Detective Comics, Batman: The Dark Knight, Superman and Aquaman, the returnability incentive was replaced with 1:25 variant-cover incentives. Batwoman, Green Lantern: New Guardians and Swamp Thing, which were promoted with a special-discount incentive from September through December, also switched to 1:25 variant-cover incentives in January. Finally, the threshold retailers were required to meet in January to qualify for returnability on the 37 titles that weren’t promoted through variant-cover or discount incentives changed from 125% of retailers’ May 2011 orders to 100% of November 2011 orders.

With this in mind, let’s wait for the February figures to see if the trend holds when incentives are equal from one month to the next.