Out of Print or Never Collected – The Pain of Trying to Read in Order

On January 24^th of this year, DC Comics will release the last Hardcover in their Superman: The Man of Steel by John Byrne. These were previously released in paperback, but became out of print, making it difficult to collect the Post-Crisis Superman stuff. However, these hardcovers have made it not only easy to pick them up, but they also look damn good on the shelf! Even if spines are a little inconsistent.

With this last volume, we will bridge the gap between the Man of Steel miniseries, and the Exile Omnibus. However, this does raise a new frustrating problem. What about the issues in between Exile and Death and Return of Superman? Across four different Superman titles, plus one or two cross over issues, there are around 127 issues between Exile and Death and Return. Looking through past trade paperbacks and collections, both from DC Comics and Titan (the previous DC distributers in England), there are 4 trades that fit in this gap.

- Dark Knight Over Metropolis

- Krisis of the Krimson Kryptonite

- Time and Time Again

- Panic in the Sky

However, these are out of print, hard to find, and are missing issues out of those 127. It’s possible that these will be reprinted in the future, but it’s still a problem for collectors. Yes, if you read your comics digitally, it is less of a problem, but out of print books are far from a problem with just older publications.

Over Christmas, I picked up the trade for Spider-Man: Spider’s Shadow, which was published on November 30^th of 2021. Just over one month before I’m writing this. I greatly enjoyed the story, as I’d enjoyed Zdarsky’s previous What If Spider-Man story, Spider-Man: Life Story. On the back cover, there is an advert for Zdarsky’s Daredevil run, which tells you exactly which volume to start with, and which volumes it consists of. Thanks to enjoying Zdarsky’s work, and spired on by Matt Draper’s Darecember series on YouTube, I wanted to give it a try. Despite that add having only been printed within a month of reading it, the first two volumes are currently out of print.

Yes, this could be seen as myself just being extremely unlucky, however, after checking multiple outlets, it seems to genuinely be out of stock with no information on whether it will be reprinted. Were this a much older book, it would be understandable, but the fact that it is being advertised by Marvel, but is unavailable, this does set a potential reader up for disappointment and might even put them off picking up the issue in the future.

Supply and demand is a real problem when it comes to physical media, and yes, companies can not keep older stories in print all the time. But keeping an active rotation, communicating with fans, or just having the stories in print that they advertise goes a long way towards keeping the medium’s history alive.

Thankfully, the last few years has made it easier to read stories from the Golden and Silver age, but it has created these periods within comics history that are becoming harder to explore. The Batman & Robin by Tomasi and Gleason Omnibus is one that many people, including Peter Tomasi himself, has been asking to put back in print. I’ve recommended it to many people, I’ve written papers on the run, but when people ask, I can’t just tell them to pick up the run since it’s out of print. Even my boss, one of the biggest Superhero fans I know, hasn’t been able to get his hands on it.

I’ve been incredibly interesting in exploring what Superhero comics were like at the time I was born. Being born during both Knightfall and Death and Return of Superman does make it a little easier, but if I want to know what happened with Green Lantern or Wonder Woman during that time, it is more difficult to find it. Either due to it being out of print, or cancelled midway through the collection. Spider-Man’s much discussed Clone Saga began the following year, but the collections go out of stock or out of print so frequently, it’s likely that someone curious about the story is reduced to recap videos. Recap videos are great for refreshing your brain or just giving you an idea of what will happen, but it’s no replacement for actually reading the story yourself.

Unless you go all digital, it is unlikely we will be able to have every story we want right at our fingertips, but there does need to be a way to communicate with companies and to petition for certain stories to be reprinted. It’s important to keep these stories around and preserve the history of Superhero comics.