addendum top last post. The market has changed on those books, now dealers would have them CGC'd rather than take them to shows and the prices skyrocketed on them so you would not likely display them in a locale like that without security, surveillance cameras and insurance now, but the fact there are a lot of them out there doesn't affect pricing. Key Silver Age Marvel* books, even higher grade one are not scarce, there is just high demand relative to supply. As Bronze Age books get older and spotlight is shown on them through movies and what not, the demand will creep up in relation to supply and prices will continue to creep, the big jumps are more market corrections at this point as Bronze Age books were undervalued for their age for a long time, and the market may have corrected too far in the opposite direction at the moment, but I doubt you will ever see them fall to the point they are chaff dollar bin exiles again.

-M

I never saw much Silver DC at the shows, an occasional Showcae 4 or 22 or some such, but I think that was a demand thing rather than supply, no one was asking for Silver DC at the shows either.

Wow, seriously?  I haven't see that many in my whole life, and I've been to ALOT of comic book stores (not many cons, granted).   Maybe the market is just bigger than I think.  

D'you know what Masterworks COST now-a-days? At 75 bucks a pop, I suspect further Golden Age/Atlas volumes would be profitable! If someone can make money selling Golden Age Heap Collections and 11 volume sets of AGC's Adventures into the Unknown, I think that previously uncollected Kirby and Ditko Strange Tales Volumes could make some money.

But I guess that Marvel needs to commit to their core audience of people who are really, really into their characters. Bah!

Can I just throw in my two-bits that if we hadn't had the Sonny Bono Act pass that Golden Age stuff that is largely sitting there doing nothing would be either in the public domain or progressively getting there, instead of locked up in the hands of our corporate masters.

So vastly more profit than dashing off 20,000 copies of Moon Knight of Squirrel Girl where you actually have to PAY creators?  Certainly restoration work for the Masterworks costs, but - as I understand it - it's actually easier with the older books because they have a smaller pallet of colors.  And it's not like they're doing a lot of outside marketing for the Masterworks.  Plus once the files are finished for Masterworks they can be repackaged for other formats - IE the recent Steranko and Starlin collections. Marvel's publishing model, as I'm sure you know, is based on making a little bit of profit off a lot of items.   The "projects that would make much more" are not in print - They're licensing the characters for Underoos and thermoses.  But Masterworks seem like they would be one of the very highest in-print profit makers aside from the now bi-weekly Spider-man # 1s. 

And at 226 volumes the Masterworks program is one of Marvel's 15 longest running titles, ever.  

I'd just prefer they would print the stuff that I want them to print.  I'm not sure about the Golden Age Volumes, but the last few Atlas volumes (A) sold a little less but not A LOT less than Hulk vol 14 or whatever, and (B) cost slightly more.   

So I don't think Marvel's reasoning is financial... at least directly.  They just need to put all their resources into promoting the characters they can put into thermoses.  And Kirby and Ditko and Maneely don't work as well for that purpose as Daredevil.  

ALSO they seem to have stopped making Sgt. Fury volumes, and the John Severin stuff was up next.  OBVIOUSLY there motive for this is Satanic evil.  

A print run of 4K will cost you 4-5X per page in printing costs alone than a run of 20K. So yes the 20K run of Moon Knight and Squirrel Girl will cost less to produce even if creator costs are figured in. And since all the issues of MK & SQ are sold on a non-returnable basis while copies of the Masterworks going into the non-Diamond book trade are returnable you aren't even guaranteed to sell the entire print run on the Masterworks like you are on the Moon Squirrel comic. And there are more pages at the higher per unit cost in the MAsterworks adding to the expense of producing them as well.

Printing presses operate on economy of scale moreso than many other operations. The more you print of the same thing, the less the per unit cost becomes. So running a product that has 20K units is vastly preferable than one that runs 4-5K units even if there are other ancillary costs in the 20K unit product like creator cost because the margins will still be much higher on the 20K unit product. If you can bump that 20K product up to 30K with a variant cover, your costs drop even more, variant covers aren't going to increase Masterwork sales even though they do them, few are getting both covers, so its not likely to bump up the print run.

-M