This plan might have made sense at the time as a way to build interest in the individual issues, but today it seems foolish to cut off that extra revenue stream.

When the first spin-off mini-series, Concrete: Fragile Creature, debuted in the summer of ’91, it was announced that a collected edition was off the table for at least three years. It wasn’t until 1994 that the full series was available under one cover, six years after the tenth and final issue was published. The original Concrete series was collected two issues at a time, but the reprints were stopped before the entire 10 issues could be collected. This tactic also meant that it was hard for new readers to jump on to a book without feeling left out.Ĭoncrete therefore took a rather circuitous road to a sensible reprint program. Many publishers feared that if they were too quick to reprint a comic in an affordable trade paperback, they might hurt the value of back issues and in turn destroy some of the “heat” around the series. a comic wasn’t considered worthwhile unless the first issue was really rare and priced at $35 in the secondary market. This was often seen as a good way to get a book some attention If you weren’t on board from the beginning, it could be quite expensive and time-consuming to track down early issues of a series, like Concrete, that was getting a lot of buzz. When I wrote this “Picks” in 1993, the concept of reprinting an entire series into trade paperbacks was still a new idea, so there was a bit of a “treasure hunt” aspect to some comics. Bart Sears drew the cover for Wizard #23, featuring Valiant Comics’ characters facing off against Image Comics’ heroes to promote the Deathmate crossover series.

Concrete, Volume 1 by Paul Chadwick