MrTinkertrain wrote:
Golly, browsing Amazon and I feel the urge to reiterate how sexy the painted covers are. Is it blasphemous to say I'd like to see what the interiors would look like painted like that?

No, but it would probably reduce the number of volumes that would come out per year if they did that!

Paperback Masterworks were something that I'd wished Marvel would have done, even back in the late '80s when they were first coming out. To this day, reading Marvel comics between hardcovers feels kinda ... "weird" to me. I guess I like the "floppier" feel, since it's closer to the feel of a real comic book. Strangely, I'm more comfortable with DC reprints being in hardcover. I think that is because as a kid I had a lot of hardcover DC reprints, like "Superman: From the '30s to the '70s" and "The Great Comic Book Super-Heroes" (the former book being also the reason I don't mind reading B&W DC Showcases but need my Marvel in color). I suppose if I'd had Stan Lee's "Origins of Super-Heroes" and "Sons of Origins" books (which I saw in bookstores all the time as a kid but for some reason never asked to buy them), I'd feel differently about it all.

Anyway, when the MMW finally did get the softcover treatment a few years later I was excited ... until I realized they were only half-sized! (Who else here remembers those first, early TPBs?) Needless to say I skipped getting them. Which was just as well as the line didn't last.

Flashfoward to just a few years ago. I was perusing a comic book store when I saw the two different versions of the current TPBs of Spider-Man Vol. 1--the marble look and the black painted cover. Guess which one this original MMWer chose to pick up? Yup, the marble look one--a) because I was used to that styling, and b) because I thought that was the "regular" edition. A month later I found out it was just the opposite. It took a little while to adjust to that fact but now I just love these new painted covers, mostly because they are built so faithfully upon the original work (so much so they give credit to the original artists as well).

But getting back to your original post, as much as I like 'em,, I wouldn't want these painted covers to replace all the interiors. Blasphemy!