DC Archive Editions

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DC Archive Editions, edited by Dale Crain for DC Comics, collect early, sometimes rare, comic books published by DC and other publishers into a permanent hardcover series. With more than 100 titles, this series began in 1989 with Superman Archives, Volume One. Most of the restoration work to make the pages suitable for quality printing has been done by Rick Keene who has restored more than 2500 pages. Keene explained his process on TechTV's The Screen Savers.^[1]

The books span DC's Golden, Silver and Bronze Age as well as titles not originally published by DC such as Will Eisner's The Spirit, Wally Wood's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, and the Fawcett and Charlton lines of super heroes as well as Mad magazine and Elfquest. The DC Archives provide a dual service in that they not only preserve DC's history but provide readers with stories that normally would not be available to them at an affordable cost. When the line first started, the cover price for an Archive was $39.95 US, but since the majority of the 1990s up to the present, the standard cover price for a DC Archive is $49.99 US (although some books in the line have cost much more, depending on how much content is collected, thus a larger page count & higher cover price).

Other titles in the series include Superman Archives, Batman Archives, Batman: The Dark Knight Archives , Black Canary Archives, Plastic Man Archives, Shazam! Archives, World's Finest Archives, The Doom Patrol Archives, Green Lantern Archives, The Flash Archives, Justice League of America Archives, Superman: The Man of Tomorrow Archives, Wonder Woman Archives, Teen Titans Archives, and many more.

In recent years, newer printings of previously published DC Archives volumes have been released at the special introductory cover price of $19.95 U.S. These were: Batman Archives Volume 1 (second printing), Batman: The Dark Knight Archives Volume 1 (third printing), and Superman Archives Volume 1 (fifth printing).

It was believed the Archive Editions from DC would soon be ending.^[2] However, in an issue of the publication Comic Shop News (issue # 1080, February 27, 2008), an update was given regarding the DC Archive Editions during an announcement regarding DC's collected editions schedule: "In spite of earlier reports of their demise, DC Archives will continue in 2008 and 2009, although in reduced numbers, focusing on continuing already-established Archives series."