You can believe them to be "excuses" if you like, but the sad fact is, and not to put too fine a point on it, publishing kinda breaks down as a business model once you don't have a critical mass of people interested in buying what's being sold. "Key first books or landmarks," that may be an important distinction, but it doesn't seem to be driving much in the way of sales.

There's just not that much interest in reprints of Golden Age material. There's decreasing interest in reprints of old comic books these days, and Golden Age comics appeal only to a small segment of a small audience. The people that love 'em, they really seem to love 'em (and more power to you, as you seem to be one of them), but there just aren't enough of 'em that every publisher is going to be willing to consider a significant ongoing commitment to reprinting them.

DC is seeing -- well, we're seeing -- sales estimates of the Archives hover at around 1,000 pre-orders, more or less. That's hardly an overwhelming demonstration of interest that's going to convince the publisher that, "Yeah, you know we really should reprint more Golden Age stuff and go back and rework some of the stuff that was reprinted two-and-a-half decades ago."

Even Marvel, a company that will push this kinda stuff to the breaking point if they believe there's still some money to be made, I think they've cut back on the number of Golden Age Masterworks each year. That's not going to have much of an immediate effect on the series of softcovers, as they're still running a few years behind, but the outlook for more Golden Age stuff from Marvel seems more hazy as time goes on.

(Even though you don't like the format of the Chronicles, I'll bet there are lots of people, some of them here, who have picked up those books, having previously passed on previous Golden Age reprints because the barrier-to-entry was too high. So there's something to be said for that.)

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