It's Andy Fish!

It’s funny- if you live long enough you see ideas that you suggested and were laughed at carried out. Back in the late 80s I was talking to a DC Editor I knew very well and the subject of large book collections came out– reprints of classic materials. At the time DC had just launched it’s ARCHIVES series, and they expected sales for the earliest issues of BATMAN and SUPERMAN to be strong, but that the series would likely end after reprinting maybe the first fifty issues or so– they didn’t think people would spend $40 for a hardcover collection of old material.

During our conversation the subject of a massive reprint edition came up, it would reprint like 30-40 issues of a title and be the size of a Gideon Bible– it would be 1000 pages or more, weigh about the same as a four year old child, and collect issues in one place that a reader could immerse themselves in. The price would be in the $75 range and it was dismissed as something that would never sell.

Well time travel ahead Omnibus Editions are a real thing– just as giant as we first imagined, but the retail price tags on these massive editions travel upwards to $150 and more. Truthfully, I own about a dozen of them and I have a hard time reading them because they are so huge and difficult to hold, but exist they do and the only people laughing are the publishers who are now quadruple dipping into classic material.