A lack of reprints for early 50s (late Golden Age/early Silver Age) stories?

[TaliaJoy]

Something that really annoys me is that it seems like Superman comics from the early Golden Age and mid-to-late Silver Age get reprinted fairly often, but there's an era in-between (roughly early 50s) them that seems to be much harder to find reprints of. For example, the Superman Chronicles series stopped before it got to that point, and even on DC Universe, they just seem to jump straight from the late 40s to the late 50s. I hope I'm just not looking hard enough, but it's really frustrating. Does anyone know of a good way to access this era of comics? Maybe some collections that I'm just not aware of?

[Kuwagaton]

I think all you can do for HQ reprints is be patient with the omnibus format. Even the showcase volumes don't cover that stuff. Whenever the newspaper reprints come back they'll also touch those years.

[Johnny Thunders!]

I think there are Newspaper Reprints of the "Atomic Age" of comics, maybe two volumes.

[superduperman]

Whenever they do "complete run of every Superman comic ever" type collections like the Chronicles or the omnibuses, they always stop before this period. Not really sure why other than they've never been reprinted before and they have a harder time doing it. There's a Superman origin that has never been reprinted in 1951 that I've never seen and would love to get my hands on. It's the first time Superboy has ever been incorporated into his origin.

[Jim Kelly]

Back when D.C. was still doing their Archives series, I despaired of ever getting Superman material from what I called the Lost Decade (1948 - 1957). One of the hurdles to doing the Archives is that DC didn't have black and white stats of the pages, so they always had to do a labour intensive process of reconstructing the black and white art. I figured if they could find black and white comics that reprinted those stories, then it would be a lot easier to reconstruct the art, so I researched a lot of British, Australian and New Zealand comics which reprinted the stories but in black and white. I posted this Lost Decade list of reprints on a few sites at the time.

Since then, some of these gaps have been filled in. We got ARCHIVES and SHOWCASE PRESENTS for WORLD'S FINEST COMICS and SHOWCASE PRESENTS for SUPERMAN FAMILY, which includes SUPERMAN'S PAL, JIMMY OLSEN. And we got a single volume for SUPERBOY. So that just leaves the solo Superman stories and most of the 1950s Superboy stories.

The problem is each time D.C. begins a new reprint series for Superman, they either begin in 1938 (for the so-called "Golden Age") or in 1958 (for the so-called "Silver Age"). As a result, they rarely ever get around to reprinting the Lost Decade.

When they first did the Annuals and Giants in the 1960s, they mainly used stories from later in the 1950s. In the 1970s, they started to reprint stories from the early 1940s. But that lost decade was hardly ever reprinted. The more that stories are reprinted, the more that stories are reprinted. And so it goes.

I always thought it would be better to put out books by years, rather than volume numbers--like they do with the Peanuts books (i.e. THE COMPLETE PEANUTS from Fantagraphic Books). That way you don't have to worry about "Golden Age" or "Atomic Age" and there isn't a Volume 1. A "Superman 1951 - 1952" is just that.