It boggles my mind that these classic collections have modern artists for the covers. I also find it a tad disrespectful. So please explain the marketing strategy behind this. You grab a new reader with a fancy modern style only to provide hundreds of pages of classic, retro, Kirby or Ditko art? Nonsensical. Are Masterworks impulse buys at bookstores? For me, I have zero interest in a collection of classic material with a cover by anyone besides the original artist. Clearly these sell better, or they wouldn't market it like this, but WHY they do fascinates me and irritates me in equal measure.

Same, while I have an affinity for the digest format (I still cherish my 2 Marvel Comics Digest volumes), Silver Age Marvel demands to be seen in wide angle lenses

Isn't digest size more like 4x5"?

Anyway, I'll stick with the old ones and the omnibuses.

The paperback editions of the original masterworks that we got, at B&N, sold okay, relative to other stuff. They were standard trade size.

6x9 is the size of what the book market calls trade paperback format; what you average paperback fiction books is printed in, rather than the mass market size paperback, for your big airport news shop thrillers and hot authors. Think more like the Penguin Classics line kind of thing. Archie did some of theirs in that format, too. That's also about the size of your average YA series book, like Harry Potter (the paperbacks), Percy Jackson, Hunger Games, etc...

and the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, the Raina Telgemeier books, the the DC Ink/Zoom books and all the other YA targeted graphic novels and trades that are the fastest growing sector of the book trade over the last 2-3 years. It is pretty much the industry standard size format for comic material sold in the book trade for the YA market. It's also close to the format/size of a lot of manga series that also sell well in that sector of the market.

If Michael Cho is the cover artist for al of them, he is the artist who took over for Darwyn Cooke on all the DC Silver and Golden Age collections in omnibus and softcover collections in that line and has a mostly retro style that fits with the older material.

As to why these when they have epics, because Epics are twice the price on the market and not priced at impulse buys, do not sell well in the book trade or with potential customers who are not already habitual comic purchasers, are not released in sequential order making it difficult for new readers to jump on, are not kept in print because they don't sell well enough or have a long shelf-life all of which adds up to them being unattractive products in the book trade or as a product that catch on in the one growth market comics have-the YA book trade.

These aren't being targeted towards 40-60 years old dudes or towards people who have traditional comic book collector sensibilities-that is a shrinking market that is slowly dying off as those customers die off and is frankly not large enough to sustain comics and largely out of touch with current market sensibilities anyways and unlikely to support products that have a chance to catch on with the wider audience. They are targeted towards the one growth market that comics have, which is a young adult reader who does not frequent comic book stories and who buys lots of series fiction in graphic novel format is the 6 x 9 format size who likes to jump in at the beginning and who follow series long term as long as the material is released sequentially, in regular intervals and maintains a consistent look and level of quality-the last one may be difficult for Marvel to achieve with their rotating creative teams over the years, but early Kirby/Lee FF and Ditko/Lee and later Lee/Romita Spider-Man have a chance to fulfill that last parameter where other Marvel Silver Age stuff does not.

In terms of going for the segment of the market that is growing and who makes up that segment of the market, the format, size, price and cover art all makes sense. In terms of appealing to someone like me (and apparently all the other crotchety old folks on this forum, not so much) but that is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact I think it's what comics need to do to capture the next generation of readers. Comics designed for the book trade, whether they were the the Fireside collections, the Tempo paperbacks or the Pocketbook editions, have long had success as an outreach product that wasn't geared towards traditional readers or collectors but succeeded in reaching and introducing vast new audiences to classic comics and created new readers of them. This is what Marvel (and DC) need to do if they are to survive the entropy that is enveloping/shrinking the direct market almost tot he point of non-viability if they wish to survive past the eventual collapse of that market. The direct market allowed comics to survive past the collapse of the newsstand era. What is there that will allow comics to survive beyond the end of the direct market era? Nothing lasts forever in comics, but comics themselves usually find a way to endure. The direct market ran a good race, but all signs point to it reaching the end of its road (in it's current dynamic) in the not too distant future. It's a good thing that publishers are looking at what viable options they have beyond the direct market and designing/creating products that can thrive in such new markets whether we old guard liek it or not.

-M

I tend to agree, based on what I saw kids examining at B&N.  They tended to go for the modern stuff, though they would check out the earlier stuff.  I probably saw more kids looking at Ultimate Spider-Man than the Spider-Man Masterworks trades.

My wife's grandson has looked at some of the trades I had kept, but was so-so on the 60s Marvel stuff.  70s and 80s stuff was more what he expected.  However, they are more about the films and tv shows than the comics.