J. Caleb Mozzocco notices a common and annoying problem with DC Comics collections:
What they ultimately decided on was collecting it as Justice League Vol. 3: Throne of Atlantis (collecting Justice League #13-17 and Aquaman #15-16) and as Aquaman Vol 3: Throne of Atlantis (collecting Justice League #15-17 and Aquaman #0 and #14-#16). The “Throne” storyline thus appears in both books, the colletctions having about 100 pages of identical material in them. Given that they are about 140-pages of story content apiece, that’s a pretty significant story overlap, and given the price of these hardcover editions $24.99, that’s gotta be maddening if you read both books in trade (And, again, these are both by Geoff Johns and both feature Aquaman; chances are, a lot of folks who read one in trade also read the other in trade).
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I’m not sure why DC does this (I suspect this is also what happens with some of the Green Lantern books and will happen once the three-book Justice Leagues crossover “Trinity War” starts showing up in collections). It may be to encourage purchase of the monthlies in the future, by punishing trade-waiters, but that seems rather unlikely. It may simply be that the folks in charge of the comics and the crossovers don’t really worry about how they’re collecting, and then a different set of folks has to try and make sense of some way to collect them while still having generally complete-ish stories in each collection.
Or they do it, because, you know, publishing two twentyfive buck collections of the largely the same material makes them more money than one and who cares if that means you end up buying the same material twice. It’s just an advanced form of the variant cover edition game. (May also help in bringing down costs if you can just slap in a chunk of ready made material in a second or third trade like this…)
Now DC could make sure that their trade collections don’t overlap this way, or create one or two collections per crossover, rather than slot them into each of the series involved, but as long as people keep buying them, why would they bother?
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