CHUD: "The Year the Floppies Died"

Lest you all think the commentary aspect of Collected Editions has fallen by the wayside, I was thinking hard today about the conversation I had earlier this month with one of our anonymous commenters, and about how far the collected editions industry has come as a whole since this blog started — I mean, now there are consistent Superman trades for gosh sakes, when during the Casey/Kelly era just a few years ago, that would've been unheard of. And browsing the news these past few days, I see we've lost both Manhunter and Firestorm — both of which had trades solicited very recently, so if this isn't frighteningly obvious to everyone so far, pre-ordering is your friend! I guarantee both those titles got the axe as soon as the trade orders came in — but what'll be interesting to see is whether we get more Manhunter and Firestorm trades — both apparently related to DC's next big crossover — even though the series have ended, a la Gotham Central. Because if a cancelled series can live on past it's demise in trade form, that's an interesting direction indeed ...

Meanwhile, Devin Faraci has a column over at CHUD regarding a decision to switch to "wait for trade," and whether 2006 was the year that killed the floppy.

"A move to longform comic books is completely overdue ... Comics used to contain multiple short stories, and eventually the stories filled out to full book length. The stories soon became bigger than the individual book’s page counts and thus was born the multi-part story, but there’s been no change in pages to keep up with the expanded storytelling ..."

Read the whole thing at the CHUD website.

Cheers!