But David that is exactly what Showcase does, it make little profit and sell in larger quantities because of the low price tag and that is my point,
Archives as a high price item are not selling as they used to while lower cost items like Showcase and Chronicles and TPBs do,
so what if DC has to spend money to color material from Showcase? They do it all the time with all kinds of TPB.


But if they spend money to color it, then the price tag goes -up-. You're assuming the price can go up and they'd continue to sell in larger quantities. You can't just add something and assume it continues to sell in the same amount, because, well, it costs MONEY to put in color and so prices go -up-, meaning it's not a low price tag anymore.

The significant thing here is that Archives can sell -much- less and still make -more- profit overall than the Chronicles/TPBs do, because they're charging -more-. That very volume is -necessary- in order for Chronicles to keep making money, and if you tinker with it by adding color costs, you raise the prices. At some point, it'll end up no longer either a) being between 160-200 pages or b) cost more than 20 dollars, and you end up losing exactly what draws people to buy them.

I don't think it's as simple as 'raise the costs of the Chronicles to pay for the costs of adding color', and we have Chronicles of stuff we don't have in Archives', in any case.

But we're wandering off topic - the original point of this topic was to propose Chronicles for stuff that won't be Archived... and I have a difficult time imagining Silver Age Chronicles -without- going through the Archives step, for the above reason. Despite the impassionated pleas by bettybrant and Osgood Peabody, the only thing I can imagine that would actually be Chronicled like that without being Archives are the stuff that would require much less color seps and prep - i.e. stuff from the 70s-on. (Which basically is a lot of the trades being used as examples here - I think a -good- number of them have been reprinted in the 70s or such in various reprints).

If I had to guess, I'd think that the most likely stuff for 'chronicles that won't be Archived' are the stuff from the 70s/80s... the same sort of selection that got us the Huntress trade, the Justice Society of America trades. I can see it happening for something like Firestorm or Warlord.

I just don't think it's likely - it seems like all the sequential collections we're getting are basically being sold on being -cheap-, as is the case with the Chronicles and the Showcases. For other things, we get stuff compiled by the 'arc' or by 'theme', and they cost more.

Either they'll be sold as Archives, or they'll be sold without the Chronicles brand.

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Brother Eye



is watching.
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