With the announcement of a New Teen Titans Omnibus series coming next year from DC Comics, this blogger wonders if it means the death knell of the DC Archives program?
From 1999-2008, DC released the four volume New Teen Titans Archives, collecting a little over the first twenty-five issues of the 1980s Marv Wolfman/George Perez series, plus various one-shots. These were some of the first "modern era" DC Archives collections, and the stories collected were among the latest material that appeared in DC Archives. The series ended just before the stories collected in the paperbacks New Teen Titans: Terra Incognito and The Judas Contract.
All four of those volumes are out of print now, and I think it's significant -- super-significant -- that DC is re-releasing this material in a series of hardcover omnibus editions. Early reports has the first omnibus volume reprinting New Teen Titans #1-16, which is also what was in the first two volumes of the archives. This must mean DC has no plans to reprint the New Teen Titans Archives, such that the Archives format is no longer the format to read these old New Teen Titans storylines any more. The DC Archives program, in essence, is shrinking.
Now, I don't want to overstate. October saw the release of Superman Archives Vol. 8, and there have been Robin and Wonder Woman volumes this year, too, so Archives isn't dead dead. But in my opinion (with no offense meant to Archives fans), the Archives volumes have for a long time looked a bit dated, jacket design-wise, to the point that I hesitate to put them out next to my Jack Kirby Fourth World or other omnibus volumes; and this New Teen Titans Ommibus release follows similar announcements of older material -- Firestorm, Infinity, Inc., and the Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby/Green Arrow books -- that one might have otherwise at one time expected to see in Archives format.
All of that leads this fan to wonder, if DC is replacing the New Teen Titans Archives with the New Teen Titans Omnibus series, might similar replacements be on the way?
(Second, all of that leads this fan to wonder, will the New Teen Titans Omnibus series go so far as to include the later material, achieving the first-ever hardcover edition of Judas Contract? Here's hoping!)
New Teen Titans Omnibus - Death of the DC Archive editions?
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