Why did DC stop the Superman Chronicles?

[superduperman]

About ten years ago, DC started doing the Superman Chronicles. Which was supposed to be every Superman story in chronological order. Then, about volume ten, they just stopped. I notice that whenever they do a Golden Age collection, they tend to do this. Get to about 1942-43 and then just stop. Is there something past that point that they are ashamed of? Were the books just not selling? DC has now released the GA stories in other formats that specifically break them down into GA and SA categories which suggests they have no intention of going past a certain point. I know that certain eras have never been reprinted or are rarely reprinted. Like the late forties to early fifties. Why does DC reprint certain eras but not others? Does anyone know the answer to this?

[MajorHoy]

You'd probably have to ask DC.
I'm assuming DC would continue issuing them as long as enough people were ordering them and DC did not run into problems in terms of finding all the individual stories in decent enough condition to reproduce.

[Jim Kelly]

What gets reprinted gets reprinted. What never gets reprinted never gets reprinted.

More or less.

When DC did the ARCHIVES (in fits and starts), they managed to get a lot of early Superman material reprinted for the first time. But this was costly (thus the relatively high prices for ARCHIVE volumes). But once they'd done that, they then had the files to keep for future reprinting. So all the reprint books since then have relied on the files that were created back then. Once they hit the place where they run out of files, it gets costly to create new files for material that has never been reprinted.

There's a big gap between the mid-40s and the mid-50s where not a lot of Superman material has ever been reprinted, so that material is going to be the most expensive to reconstruct.

But maybe DC is waiting for the market and the technology to change. As more and more people get their comics on screens, there might not be the money in reconstructing pages for print publication. But DC could decide to scan the old comics and release all those scans as digital comics. The quality of scans at the moment is not that great--but that's a technology that should improve.

[MykeHavoc]

My guess would be golden/silver age reprints are a niche within a niche. Finding the right format for the consumer seems to have taken some time, with the omnibus winning out, followed by the half-length standard size softcovers a year or so later.

[SanityOrMadness]

But maybe DC is waiting for the market and the technology to change. As more and more people get their comics on screens, there might not be the money in reconstructing pages for print publication. But DC could decide to scan the old comics and release all those scans as digital comics. The quality of scans at the moment is not that great--but that's a technology that should improve.

It's not the scans that's the problem. It's the pages, and having to reverse-engineer from sub-optimal quality:
1) The issues were originally printed on low-quality newsprint, where the ink spread in slightly unpredictable ways. Even when new, the linework wouldn't precisely represent the original art.
2) Registration issues, both from the Little Old Lady production line that worked on the colour separations occasionally being sloppy with scissorwork, and more generally from plates going out of alignment. At the time, that wouldn't have been considered serious - but for a high-end, high-cost reproduction in the 21st century?
3) Age. Even if there's the odd random find in some place which makes a splash when CGC deem it a "9.8" or whatever, these were printed on cheap acidic paper for kids 70-odd years ago. Finding a copy which is so much as intact is not easy. Even if they do, there's almost certainly going to be age-related blemishes and problems with the comics they get.

I mean, I'm sure the scanners have improved over the years, but it's still a case of garbage-in-garbage-out.

[superduperman]

What gets reprinted gets reprinted. What never gets reprinted never gets reprinted.

More or less.

When DC did the ARCHIVES (in fits and starts), they managed to get a lot of early Superman material reprinted for the first time. But this was costly (thus the relatively high prices for ARCHIVE volumes). But once they'd done that, they then had the files to keep for future reprinting. So all the reprint books since then have relied on the files that were created back then. Once they hit the place where they run out of files, it gets costly to create new files for material that has never been reprinted.

There's a big gap between the mid-40s and the mid-50s where not a lot of Superman material has ever been reprinted, so that material is going to be the most expensive to reconstruct.

But maybe DC is waiting for the market and the technology to change. As more and more people get their comics on screens, there might not be the money in reconstructing pages for print publication. But DC could decide to scan the old comics and release all those scans as digital comics. The quality of scans at the moment is not that great--but that's a technology that should improve.

I hadn't even thought of this! Yeah, it would be a problem to reproduce high quality stories that were originally done on newsprint. I remember when the Sunday Classics volume came out a lot of them were very dull looking and gray. Some with actual markings on them. I imagine stuff like that isn't the easiest to come by to begin with. This makes a lot of sense. So if they ever did reprint it, it probably wouldn't be $20 at your LCS.

[superduperman]

It's not the scans that's the problem. It's the pages, and having to reverse-engineer from sub-optimal quality:
1) The issues were originally printed on low-quality newsprint, where the ink spread in slightly unpredictable ways. Even when new, the linework wouldn't precisely represent the original art.
2) Registration issues, both from the Little Old Lady production line that worked on the colour separations occasionally being sloppy with scissorwork, and more generally from plates going out of alignment. At the time, that wouldn't have been considered serious - but for a high-end, high-cost reproduction in the 21st century?
3) Age. Even if there's the odd random find in some place which makes a splash when CGC deem it a "9.8" or whatever, these were printed on cheap acidic paper for kids 70-odd years ago. Finding a copy which is so much as intact is not easy. Even if they do, there's almost certainly going to be age-related blemishes and problems with the comics they get.

I mean, I'm sure the scanners have improved over the years, but it's still a case of garbage-in-garbage-out.

That's a good point, too. A lot of them might not have been great quality even as they were originally printed. And I imagine with paper being one of the rationed items during the war, what they could get might not have been in the best of shape. What survived is what survived. I know even the original artwork wasn't kept back then.

[Jim Kelly]

It's not the scans that's the problem. It's the pages, and having to reverse-engineer from sub-optimal quality: . . . .

[Not quoting the whole post all over again to save space]

Quite agree and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. I just didn't want to get into all that detail, so I'm glad you did it for me. What I really meant is that it's possible in the future you'll have some technology that does all that and does it automatically and fast. So it can quickly scan and process those scans and clean up the image and correct the image and create digital files in a cheap way. That process might not exist now, but there's no reason to think that advanced programming won't get there one day.

Of course, there's still the problem of finding the original comics.

The other way to go is the reconstruction process (really multiple different versions of reconstruction that DC has done over the years), where the black and white plate is reconstructed and then new plates (or files) are done using the old comics as a guide.

When reconstruction seemed the only way that DC was going to go--back when the ARCHIVES were still being produced--I did some research on the "Lost Decade" as I called it (the time between 1947 and 1957) to look for previous reprints.

Because whenever DC did reconstructions for the ARCHIVES, they tried to use the reprints (from Giants, Super-Specs) if they existed rather than using the original comics, so they could avoid using the really old comics, which sometimes were hard to find--and when they used the Theakston process it actually destroyed the comic.

That's why (I believe) the SUPERMAN ARCHIVES did the SUPERMAN title first rather than the ACTION COMICS title--as the early issues of SUPERMAN reprinted stories from ACTION, so rather than trying to get several early issues of ACTION and possibly destroying them in the process, they could use the SUPERMAN issues.

So I did research to find how much of the Lost Decade had been reprinted over the years. And while not a lot had been reprinted in North America (at that time), there were comics in the UK and Australia that published that material. The beauty of those comics is that most were in black and white. So reconstructing a black and white plate from those comics would be easier and probably cheaper.

Back then, I put my list on a couple of sites--showing a complete list of all the Superman family stories from the Lost Decade and where they had been reprinted if they had been reprinted (in English, there's also foreign language reprints but I didn't want to get into all that research). That list is floating around in cyberspace, but it's very much out of date, as there's been reprints since then and I have since found listings for a lot more UK and Australia comics--but I'm too lazy to try and update the list.

[Jim Kelly]

In case anyone's interested there's one version of my list (actually 1948 - 1958 or so it says) on http://www.marvelmasterworks.com/sup...ostdecade.html

However, as I say, this is very out of date. There's a lot more that could be added now. And for some reason the webmaster must have edited my list, because the one that I made included Jimmy Olsen, Superman/Batman and Superboy.

But all the material for Jimmy and Supes/Bats has been reprinted now in modern volumes and DC collected the earliest Superboy stories in one hardcover book. Still, there's considerable Superboy material that was re-published in Australia--it's a shame that so much of Superboy has never been reprinted in North America, because those stories added a lot to the Superman mythos.

[Jon Clark]

What gets reprinted gets reprinted. What never gets reprinted never gets reprinted.

More or less.

When DC did the ARCHIVES (in fits and starts), they managed to get a lot of early Superman material reprinted for the first time. But this was costly (thus the relatively high prices for ARCHIVE volumes). But once they'd done that, they then had the files to keep for future reprinting. So all the reprint books since then have relied on the files that were created back then. Once they hit the place where they run out of files, it gets costly to create new files for material that has never been reprinted.

There's a big gap between the mid-40s and the mid-50s where not a lot of Superman material has ever been reprinted, so that material is going to be the most expensive to reconstruct.

But maybe DC is waiting for the market and the technology to change. As more and more people get their comics on screens, there might not be the money in reconstructing pages for print publication. But DC could decide to scan the old comics and release all those scans as digital comics. The quality of scans at the moment is not that great--but that's a technology that should improve.

Isn't there a story that someone at DC saved a bunch of stuff from being pulped at one point? Maybe what they have reprinted is all they actually have original copies of.

[Jim Kelly]

Isn't there a story that someone at DC saved a bunch of stuff from being pulped at one point? Maybe what they have reprinted is all they actually have original copies of.

Marv Wolfman saved original pages from being destroyed. This would have been when he was a flunky at National Periodicals/DC in the late '60s. He was told to destroy all this material, but he tried to save a lot of it by sneaking it out of the DC offices. However, I think this was mostly work that DC had written off--paid for but never published.

There had to be photostats if not originals of the '40s comics at one time, given so many stories were republished in foreign editions. I would guess they kept the photostats for that purpose. But at some point in time all that was thrown out--maybe when DC moved to new offices. DC never does SHOWCASE PRESENTS for earlier comics for that reason-whereas they have photostats or film negatives going back to the mid-'50s which makes the SPs cheaper to produce.-

[TaliaJoy]

It kinda breaks my heart a wee little bit that the "late Golden Age" is so hard to access. I'm very interested in reading it, in part because it covers the era when the first couple of seasons of the George Reeves show was on air, and that's my favorite Superman media. I want to see how the comics did - or didn't - correspond to it. Plus I just like the Golden Age in general.