Just to be clear, I completely agree -- and I've mentioned this on numerous occasions, too -- that the early Archives are riddled with poor color work, restoration using processes that have since been superceded, and even a few very obvious poorly-redrawn pages. It'd have been great to see that stuff improved -- I suspect most of the reason this never happened was not entirely because of the costs, but because there was so much turnover in Collected Editions over the course of two decades that there wasn't always someone aware that the work was necessary when the opportunities arose.

I think this Superman Omnibus could present one of those opportunities (and the margins would certainly support that work, which is something that couldn't be said about the Chronicles), but let's be realistic -- there's just barely a sustainable market for Golden Age reprints these days, even of Superman or Batman, and even if the work were done, there would probably be limited (if any) opportunity to spread those costs over future projects. Promoting the book as "remastered" (or whatever), that's likely not going to have an appreciable impact on sales. It becomes more difficult to make a compelling argument "for."

There's likely to come a point, I'm sure, where Marvel is going to count its' beans and decide that they can make that much more money on the Masterworks paperbcks if they run them from materials on hand. I just hope that's past the point of the worst of the later Masterworks.

In The Back Of Beyond: My photography blog. Everything seen through the camera of my iPhone.
Last Edited By: Fin Fang Foom Jan 30 13 2:53 PM. Edited 1 times.