Let’s not even begin to pretend that DC is the only one doing this.  Marvel has been just as brazen, probably more so, with their line-wide crossovers, starting with Civil War.  Not only do you get such volumes as Civil War, Civil War: Front Line, Civil War: Spider-Man, Civil War: Wolverine and so forth, Marvel went back and did a Civil War Chronicles comic aimed at the newsstand audience that integrated the various titles in a readable chronological order.  That’s not doing the book reader any favors.

I’m very curious in what order Secret Invasion is recommended to be read as a collected edition.  The story was set up by years of hint-dropping in various titles, then as the monthly mini-series unfolded, certain titles like Avengers ran flashback stories explaining how the infiltration occurred.  If you picked your comics up every week, it unfolded in both directions by the week, but the collected editions won’t reflect this.

It seems that as DC and Marvel move towards universe-wide story arcs tying in an increasing number of individual titles, they aren’t stopping to think how these things should be collected.  DC made a tacit admission of that with their Final Crisis correction.

Should the direct market contract, more people will be looking to either the TPBs or the Internet for their comics.  Now maybe reading the serials online and in parallel on a weekly basis will keep this sloppy treatment of crossover collected editions going, but having read both Final Crisis and Secret Invasion as an individual mini-series in one sitting to approximate the reading of a TPB, I can assure you the book crowd is not going glom on what ends up being the truncated version forever.

Maybe we need to see Secret Invasion volumes 1-5, much like we saw Batman: No Man’s Land volumes 1-5.  Maybe crossovers will eat up too much production time.  If one doesn’t prove popular, it could drag down the sales of several books.  Suddenly, you have a year with no Avengers, Mighty Avengers, Avengers Initiative, Iron Man, etc and you have 5 volumes of Secret Invasion.  Do you have to re-launch each series (in book form) when you get back to self-contained stories in those series?

Moving away from the realm of poorly packaged crossovers, you start moving into the realm of branding.  Since most TPBs are 4-6 issues, it logically stands that it would be 4-6 months between TPBs for most series.  Vertigo has proved this can provide for a sustainable sales track, but with superheroes, this is a new deal.  How will people react, not being able to get their monthly dose of Green Lantern or Hulk?

Some of the more popular characters are positioned to come close to producing a monthly TPB.  Spider-Man’s 36 issues/per year format would yield 9 4-part collections or be potentially bi-monthly in 6-issue collections.  Superman and Batman might be ballpark for that (that is, when Superman and Batman are actually in their regular titles).  The Avengers certainly have enough spin-offs, though the flavors certainly vary between titles.  It requires a bit more thinking ahead, but it’s doable.

What about the Flash?  What about Daredevil?  Will these titles sustain on what could theoretically be a twice-a-year schedule to a large portion of their audience?

Realistically, these frequency issues are already not a probably for the many people who currently “wait for the trade” and read comics only in the collected format.  Potentially, there is still Internet serialization to pick up losses in audience from a direct market implosion.  Still, especially with a shared universe, publishers need to think a little harder about how they want to be packaging their TPBs.

Honestly, whether the direct market contracts or not, those cross-over TPBs could stand a little more thought towards formats.

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