I suspect that, if Archives are to survive in the near term, they will become loss leaders for the Chronicles...


I doubt that! At the point where the Archives format ceases to meet a minimum baseline to make publishing those books worthwhile, well, they just won't be published! (In which case, the Chronicles series that require so much pre-production work will come to a close, or be reconfigured in some way.) I can't imagine DC would keep publishing Archives just to eek out a few more dollars on sales of a few $20 trade paperbacks (that aren't that profitable to begin with).


For the Golden Age Chronicles, that may be true, but now that they're branching into Silver Age Chronicles, where the reproduction is not as costly, I wouldn't say that's a given necessarily.


I don't expect DC will make any substantial departures from custom with the Chronicles, even with Silver Age material. Those books may seem to sell reasonably well (well enough that DC continues to publish them, at least), but at $20 retail, it isn't as if DC is making a great deal of money (see above), and every dollar spent producing them just thins out the margins a bit more.

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Last Edited By: Fin Fang Foom Aug 10 09 2:52 PM. Edited 1 times.