I'll try to keep this as spoiler light as possible...
I recently finished reading the trade of Uncanny X-Men 1-10. At the end, there is someone wearing a hoodie (See? Spoiler light. if you read it, you know who it is, though. I can't imagine anyone was reading through #10 going "Who the heck is that?". ).
My impression is that one would really want to read Uncanny X-Men Annual #1 next for an explanation.
However, the next trade (Not yet released) seems to just pick up at regular issue #11 according to a summary on a retailer website listing included issues. Obviously, it wasn't in the trade I just read (I would have noticed ).
So, um, what's going on there? Is the annual actually going to be in the next trade despite what the website I saw said? Or do people actually have to buy the annual separately to get that story?
I mean, the trade I read was $10.99 on sale for 10 issues including one that was double or triple sized (And I used a gift certificate, so it was really just opportunity cost). $5 for 1 issue doesn't seem like a very good deal, relatively speaking, even if it does have a few extra pages.
Isn't the thing with trades in part designed so that if you can't afford to pay $4-$5 an issue, you can get them later at essentially $1-$2 an issue bound together and stay in on the story? I figured the incentive to buy by the issue was immediacy and the sort of disincentive to trade wait was, well, the wait- not that you miss a pivotol part of the story if you stick to trades.
But, really, I'm more just trying to figure out if they are really excluding the annual from the next trade than complaining. I could complain, but that's not why I'm posting.