Keep Circulating the Tapes/Comic Books

Comic books

 * Any Marvel/Miracleman comic, due to notorious legal wrangling over the rights to the characters and stories. The rights were acquired by Marvel in 2009, but only for the original 1950s/1960s Marvelman stories, the scripts from the Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman stories, and the rights to use the characters in new stories. While this means that the Gaiman stories can be reprinted, Neil's run completed, and new Marvelman stories published, the Moore stories are still off-limits due to Marvel having to renegotiate with the artists, among which includes Rick Veitch, who has been singled-out as being a potential hold-out due to his disdain for Marvel.
 * Due to Disney's infamous lawsuit, Air Pirates Funnies, a 1970s underground comix series unauthorized by Disney which depicted Disney characters in sexually-explicit situations, is completely out of print. Original copies are valuable, although the series has made appearances on the internet.
 * Alan Moore's Marvel Pastiche series Nineteen Sixty Three. Also Alan Moore's few-but-canonically-significant Doctor Who comics, because of Moore's strained relations with Marvel UK.
 * Suicide Squad, a popular late-1980s series which had super-villains being sent on black-ops missions in exchange for a full pardon for their crimes, remains uncollected and plans for a black-and-white Showcase Presents reprint were scuttled by issues involving royalty rates for DC Comics published from 1976-96. These royalty rates also have screwed other Showcase titles such as Jonah Hex (Volume 2 can't be released because the issues that would be collected would contain issues published in this timeframe) and scuttled plans for Showcase volumes collecting "Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew" and "Who's Who in the DC Universe".
 * More specifically, DC royalty rates from this time period were for a fixed amount rather than a percentage of the cover price. Showcase Presents reprints a lot of issues at a low cover price, and the fixed amounts would make it unprofitable, so DC has to renegotiate everything.
 * While a color TPB ultimately DID come out for the first nine issues, the second volume (effectively collecting everything in the aborted Showcase Presents volume) was cancelled a week before it was to come out and DC basically once again shelved the series.
 * Jon Muth's gorgeous graphic novel "Dracula: A Symphony in Moonlight and Nightmares", published by Marvel Graphic Novels in the early 90's, hasn't seen the light of day for years, despite it being one of the best and more unique adaptations of Stoker's novel and would be of great interest to Dracula fans.
 * Legion of Super-Heroes fans have long suffered due to politics involving the comic's most famous writer-turned-head of DC Comics Paul Levitz. Levitz, known for vetoing the collection of stories whose writers and artists are out of favor with DC Comics for various reasons, has long refused to collect his Legion run in TPB format, going so far as even stopping the popular and commercially-successful LOSH Hardcover Archive series due to it having reached the point where his first issues on the book were published, just so that he could use the lack of his books released to justify his corrupt policies of who gets their work collected. This has had a detrimental effect upon the Legion franchise as, save for the Great Darkness Saga (which was out of print for over a decade), the only way to buy the Legion was to pay $50 a volume for the DC Archives, which while being a comprehensive collection of all Legion stories, consists mainly of the Adventure Comics era, which are at best a mixed bag qualitywise. The Legion's 1980s run, where Levitz took over the franchise and made it into a hit series, remained uncollected and unseen until two years ago when Levitz (to tie into the return of the Pre-Zero Hour Legion) released two volumes collecting the first 13 issues of Legion V3, ironically even as "The Great Darkness Saga" has once again fallen out of print.
 * The post-Levitz Legion also suffers this and then some. The controversial V4 run by Keith Giffen and the Bierbaums remains uncollected. The 1994 reboot had its first eight issues and a later storyline involving a retread of the Great Darkness Saga collected, but nothing else. Part of this was due to artist Oliver Coipel, who drew four and half years of the reboot leaving DC to go work for Marvel, leading to Levitz blacklisting him and refusing to collect any of the Legion stories he drew in TPB. Also, when the last 1994 Legion reboot story (a crossover special with the 2002 Teen Titans relaunch) finally see the light of day as part of a Teen Titans TPB, the collection omitted the final pages of the story, where the Legion rally together as their world is destroyed and they are cast outside of the known universe to rot for all time. To add insult to injury, the critically-panned 2004 reboot has, save for a single issue, been completely collected with the last year of the book seeing print not just in softcover but also hardcover.
 * An infamous case is Hellblazer, which has huge chunks of the series uncollected. Although original series writer Jamie Delano's work is finally in the process of being reissued in trade paperback (as of 2010 everything from Issue #1 through "The Family Man" is available), not one issue of Paul Jenkins's forty-issue run on the title has been collected, despite this including some of the series' pivotal events such as Constantine's.
 * Swamp Thing suffered this for years with several major issues (the last four issues of Len Wein's original run on the title, the first Alan Moore Swamp Thing story) uncollected until most recently as DC began re-releasing the TPBs in hardcover. Still, stuff like Nancy Collins' back-to-basics run and Grant Morrison and Mark Millar's controversial runs on the title remain uncollected, as does the Marty Pasko run (Saga of the Swamp Thing #1-19), the last 4-5 issues of which are crucial for setting up the bulk of Alan Moore's plotlines in the book.
 * Spider-Man suffers this as well — Marvel has done a lousy job collecting and keeping in print most of the character's defining storylines. While both Essential Spider-Man and Essential Spider-Man have now reached Roger Stern and Peter David's legendary runs (and the first third of David Micheline's legendary run on Amazing Spider-Man released as an omnibus), good luck if you are wanting to find most of Spidey's stuff like DeMatteis and Gerry Conway's Spectacular Spider-Man or Tom DeFalco's Amazing Spider-Man.
 * The bulk of Bill Mantlo's work as a comic creator remain uncollected. While Marvel has recently announced two oversized TP Bs collecting the first 40 issues of his Hulk run and most of his Spider-Man stuff is available in the Essential line, his Micronauts and Rom work remains in legal limbo hell while his Alpha Flight run (featuring early pre-fame artwork from Mike Mignola and Jim Lee) is still not collected.
 * A lot of 1990s Marvel stuff remains uncollected, even with Marvel recently making headway in collecting it via their "Marvel Classics" line. The 1990s Guardians of the Galaxy series; Nightstalkers (which brought Blade back after fading away into comic limbo and resolved several major dangling plotlines from the 1970s The Tomb of Dracula series); Thunderbolts, Generation X; and X-Man has yet to be collected.
 * Thunderbolts, Generation X, and X-Man are now being collected and while the 90s series has yet to be collected, all of the Guardians of the Galaxy material from the various anthology comics Marvel originally published them in have finally been collected.
 * DC has its own 1990s stuff that has yet to be collected, be it obscure cult favorites (Major Bummer; Darkstars; Young Heroes In Love) to major books that are a no-brainer for collecting (the 1990s Robin series; the Kyle Rayner Green Lantern run of Ron Marz; L.E.G.I.O.N.; Mark Waid's Flash run; Peter David's Aquaman run). While DC has released "Best Of" volumes of the early Rayner Green Lantern stories, their attempt to do a comprehensive collecting of Kyle's Green Lantern run failed to sell enough to justify further volumes. And the Robin thing is even more insulting, given that Nightwing and Birds of Prey (other Batman spin-offs) have received numerous TPBs over the years collecting the bulk of those two series.
 * Young Justice only had one TPB released. The book ran for six years and over 50 issues, and saw strong sales throughout that time, but DC has never seen fit to put any real effort into collecting it -- not even after the success of the Young Justice cartoon!
 * Stormwatch Team Achilles and Wildcats V3.0 only had the first year's worth of stories collected, as both comics were critical darlings with poor sales, leading to them being put down and replaced with more traditional versions of the concepts that have been largely panned by fans of the "Eye of the Storm" books.
 * Wildcats 3.0, at least, is finally being collected in full in two large trade paperbacks - just in time for Wildstorm's shuttering.
 * Joe Casey's non-crossover Adventures Of Superman run remains uncollected, even though his book was widely praised to be the best of the early-2000s Superman books.
 * While DC has begun to make a serious effort to collect the Giffen/DeMatteis/McGuire JLI/JLA run, fans still hold onto the first JLI TPB ("A New Beginning") and not the most recent printing, based off of the first edition hardcover re-release. The original TPB contains a lengthy introduction where Giffen discusses in graphic detail how he got the job writing the book, how the roster came about, the politics that determined that he could only use Batman and Martian Manhunter as far as founding Big Seven members, and the overall tone of the book. This fascinating look at the behind-the-scenes making of this beloved incarnation of the franchise was replaced with a one-page "intro" that is extremely brief and barely mentions the behind-the-scenes stuff except in a brief aside.
 * New Teen Titans suffers this — vague, often butchered TPBs have been released of random stories (with the only common theme being that they are drawn by George Perez), while the only way to read the stories in chronological order is the uber-expensive "Archive" Hardcovers, with DC recently announcing that the Hardcover collecting will stop now that they've reached the point where the earliest issue number TPB would be the next volume.
 * The Transformers Generation 1 UK comic stories featuring Death's Head cannot be reprinted in the US, since Marvel owns the character. Luckily, prior to IDW getting the UDS reprint rights, they were collected in the UK via Titan (who distributes Marvel's trade paperbacks in England) with Titan scoring global distribution rights, meaning that they could be grey-market imported to the States.
 * The situation vis-a-vis Death's Head may have been resolved, as an old Doctor Who Magazine comics story featuring Death's Head as an antagonist was reprinted by IDW.
 * G.I. Joe for years suffered this, especially after Marvel attempted to reprint the books only to stop after reaching #50. Luckily, IDW has picked up the ball and is now reprinting the entire series.
 * Matt Howarth included several real people as characters in his various Bugtown comic book series. He asked their permission to do so, but did not anticipate any future reprint market. So Howarth feels the permission only covered the original publication of the books and he would need new assent to republish the books in collected form. As he has been unable to contact several of the people involved, some of whom have since passed away, these series have never been collected.
 * Peter Milligan and Chris Bachalo's mind-bendingly experimental Vertigo Comics revamp of Shade the Changing Man remains unavailable for purchase, except for a 2004 TPB of the first six issues. DC likely planned to use this as a test for future TPBs, but since the first arc is the weakest of the 70-issue series, it failed to garner significant interest.
 * This is slowly being changing. The first volume of the series was re-released with a second in December 2009, and a third in July 2010.
 * DVD pack-in comics, specifically those that are only packaged with special edition DVDs (bonus points if its only sold by a certain chain of stores) or ones that are only released in certain regions.
 * Spawn issues 9 and 10 have a history of coming in and out of limbo in reprint volumes. #9, held up due to the legal battles with Neil Gaiman, the co-author of the issue who claims partial ownership of the (continuity-important) he introduced, and #10 because it was a Cerebus Crossover issue that Dave Sim has not authorized for reprints.
 * This seems to be resolved, as both issues were included in the oversized Spawn Origins Collection: Book 1 hardcover book, with a letter by Dave Sim explaining the story behind the making and reprinting troubles of issue #10 included as a forward to that issue.
 * If you want to collect the comic stories that ran in Disney Adventures, you're pretty much gonna have to go to eBay and try to win auctions on the issues, or their reprints in Disney's Colossal Comics Collection. However, Boom! Studios is now reprinting the Darkwing Duck stories.
 * The Legend of the Chaos God, a five part Cross Through story which is widely regarded as one of the greatest stories ever printed in the magazine, has never been reprinted. The only way to read it is to buy all five of the original issues online, or find page scans on the internet.
 * Archie Comics seems to rarely reprint stuff involving their (Non-Pureheart) superhero output: They themselves put out three trade paperbacks in the early 2000s on certain characters.
 * Archie is offering many of the stories as part of its New Crusaders digital subscription service starting Spring 2012.
 * The pulp style comic series ''Starblazer books, despite some incredibly good stories and a small but very loyal fandom is doomed to obscurity by the refusal to reprint any stories even as a collection. The old books themselves are getting increasingly hard to come by as time takes its toll.
 * Elf Quest, while an excellent series, hasn't been reprinted since 2003, its quarter-centennial, and the only full-ish reprints--the Donning/Starblaze 20th anniversary Readers Collections--are getting harder and harder to find as time goes on. On the plus side, all of it--and even never-printed material from aborted series--is available on the official website.
 * The issues of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mirage written and illustrated by Rick Veitch (issues #24-26 and 30 of Volume One of the original Mirage run, plus the story "North by Downeast" initially serialized in Plastron Cafe #1-4 and later colorized and given a conclusion in the two-part Casey Jones mini-series) face problems when it comes to reprints as Veitch never signed away those rights. Possibly the TMNT stories by a guy named Rick Arthur (who did TMNT Vol. 1 #41 and a short story called "Lucindra" in Turtle Soup (vol. 2) #1) fall into the same trap, though there's no confirmation from anyone involved with the franchise (nor from Rick Arthur himself, who seems to have fallen off the face of the earth without doing any other other comic book work). Frank Bella, who did the two-page gag story "Pesticide" in Turtle Soup (vol. 1) #1, also never signed away reprint rights, which leads this troper to believe that the same thing happened with the other story in that special (save for one done by Mirage regular Eric Talbot which was later reprinted, a crossover story with Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo which has been reprinted times, and one by Steve Bissette who did sell the rights to his TMNT-related work). Some of the other TMNT short stories and Vol. 1 issues done by freelance writers and artists during the late 1980s and early 1990s may also have legal problems, but in some cases it's hard to tell since Mirage's contracts could be a bit loose regarding reprint rights at the time.
 * Unlike its popular American cousin, Sonic the Comic has yet to be collected into volumes. The series is extremely hard to find (as everytime you search for it the Archie's comics come up instead), though there are sites specifically made for buying issues of the comic. It's still hard to get certain issues though.
 * Entire companies suffer from this trope. If you like First Comics in the 80s, only American Flagg has seen a reprint: books like Jon Sable Freelance, Nexus, Badger, Grimjack, Dynamo Joe, and Mars languish in obscurity. A lot of the output of companies like Malibu, Eclipse, and Comico are similar. For more obscure companies, like Neal Adams's Continuity Comics, not even graphic novels exist.
 * Actually, most of the First Comics books mentioned has been reprinted in some form. The exception is Dynamo Joe.
 * Marvel's current policy is to not maintain any inventory. Once they print a trade or hardcover and send it out you'd better hope it doesn't sell out because unless it's a really popular series its not going to get a second printing. This means that there are trades just two years old that are already out-of-print. Some of them are trades released to replace older out-of-print collections, which is as ridiculous as it sounds.
 * None of the volumes of Albedo: Erma Felna EDF, the original Furry Comic, were ever re-issued. Unlike its sequel, Birthright, which is currently slowly being put out as a Web Comic.

Newspaper Comics

 * While U.S. Acres will hardly get reprinted, the strips are available, in color, on the official Garfield website - though they're releasing one per day, and only started in August 2010.
 * Dick Tracy has few reprints available and in the case of the Max Collins era strips (which were critically acclaimed) few have ever been reprinted, save the various sequences collected in the Anniversary editions. Fantagraphics is releasing The Complete Chester Gould Dick Tracy archive editions however, and The Collins Case Files are currently on its third volume.