In an industry faced with diminishing readership and moral watchdogs out to crucify comics in a frighteningly Wertham-esque way, all retailers should take time to review material questionable for their clientele. That's called 'customer service' and accountability, among other things.
But let's lighten up a little.
The reference Peter David made to a sex act was far less embarrassing than the Starr Report, which dominated the evening news and Internet downloads during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Of course, most kids never saw the Starr report, right? They were too busy watching MTV's Real World and listening to rap music, or leafing through Maxim and Stuff at the salon, to care.
We're not talking about Leave It To Beaver. This is 2003. Kids today are way-yyy more hip to this stuff than I was. I'm embarrassed that I don't know as much as they do! Of course, there's always the concern that upstanding adults, former Supergirl readers who followed David to Fallen Angel, might be offended. These would be the same readers who supported Peter David's Supergirl when it portrayed God as a child, the heroine as a 'fallen angel' (more on that later), lesbian love, and experimented monthly with religious concepts of deity, deviltry, and destiny? Uh-huh.
No, Fallen Angel was not labeled for mature readers. Should it have been? Probably. But anyone who read the first issue would not have been shocked by the overt sexual nature of the second. As for Buddy Saunder's 40% drop from the first to the second issue, I thought retailers expected a minimum of a 25% drop between # 1 and # 2; historically, first issues sell significantly better to speculators, experimenters, the curious, or the misled. I usually count on a drop in sales when I place orders (and, yes, sometimes it bites me in the butt).
Fallen Angel is, in my opinion, an unofficial sequel to Supergirl. The main character is named 'Lee' (as in Linda Lee), is a 'fallen angel,' and exhibits many of Supergirl's powers (invulnerability, heat vision, super-speed and -strength, etc). I refer to it as 'Peter David's Alan Moore's Supergirl.' It's darker, steamier, and definitely more mature. It even has Adolf Hitler as a bartender. Peter David is doing a pulp fiction turn on classic characters, exploring the noir genre, and probably laughing his butt off all the way to the bank. DC could never publicly acknowledge that Fallen Angel is really David's Supergirl repackaged, but the fact that the one replaced the other seems evident. That being said, I do not see all my Supergirl customers embracing Fallen Angel. Some, who have followed Peter David's career for years, did make the leap. Many did not. We sold very well on Fallen Angel # 1, promoting mostly to Supergirl subscribers. Our sales on #2 dropped, ironically, 40%, and we did not label or restrict the sales based on the sexual content.