Keep Circulating the Tapes/Comic Books: Difference between revisions

** 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.

* ''[[Legion of Super-Heroes (comics)|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'''.

* ''[[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.

* 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.

** ''[[Young Justice (comics)|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 (animation)|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.

* 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 [[Justice League of America|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.

* 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.

* ''[[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.

** ''[[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.

* The pulp style comic series ''[[wikipedia:Starblazer|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.

* 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]]''.