Keep Circulating The Tapes / Comic Books Rescued

• Dark Horse Comics Predator series have been unavailable since they lost the licence in 2020, but as of October 2022, Marvel Comics (who now hold the Predator comic rights) have announced paper and digital reprints. Marvel did something similar for Alien, but in that instance the reprints started almost as soon as they gained the rights.
• Marvel Comics is steadily republishing their back catalogue as digital comics.
  • In 2000, Marvel finally released a volume of Essential Conan the Barbarian... which was never followed up, as Dark Horse Comics acquired the license soon after. Seven years later, Dark Horse started reprinting not only the original Conan ongoing, but also Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian, King Conan, and all the other Comic-Book Adaptation(s) of Robert E. Howard's works. Marvel then got the rights again, and republished all of their previous work digitally (as well as printing hardback omnibus editions of Solomon Kane and Kull), only to lose the rights a second time in 2022.
  • The 1994 Marvel UK series Dark Guard, never collected as a trade paperback, was finally republished as a digital comic in September 2022, after almost 30 years.
  • Issues 13 to 36 of the Marvel Classics Comics series (comic re-imaginings of classic literature) were collected in an omnibus and released in September 2020. Issues 1 to 12 aren't included in the set because they are reprints of Pendulum Press Now Age Classics line, which aren't owned by Marvel.
  • Truth: Red, White & Black was notoriously unavailable for many years, before being republished after a version of Isaiah Bradley was introduced to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
• Marvel's Miracleman was long considered to be inextricably Screwed by the Lawyers, due to notoriously complex legal wrangling between multiple camps over the rights to the characters and stories. The rights were acquired by Marvel in 2009, but only for the original 1950s/1960s Marvelman stories, the scripts from the Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman stories, and the rights to use the characters in new stories. While this meant that the Gaiman stories could be reprinted, Neil's run completed, and new Marvelman stories published, the Moore stories were still off-limits due to Marvel having to renegotiate with the artists, and a reprint without the Moore stories was considered infeasible since they were the ones that most people wanted to see. Marvel finally managed to come to an agreement with the artists and started releasing the Moore run, initially in serial comics form, in 2014. However, Moore refused to allow his name to be used on the comics, causing him to be credited only as 'The Original Writer'. According to Moore, this was because he had come to believe that the original Marvelman creator Mick Anglo had been cheated out of his rights, and that it had been wrong for Moore to write about the character.
• Flex Mentallo was originally introduced in an issue of Doom Patrol as a parody of the well-known "Insult That Made a Man out of Mac" comic-strip bodybuilding ads by Charles Atlas. Later on, in 1996, he got a mini-series of his own, written by his creator Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely. Some time after the mini-series came out someone (reportedly a fan who thought they'd be flattered) informed the Charles Atlas company about Flex, and they promptly sued DC (the publisher of Doom Patrol and Flex Mentallo) for trademark infringement. Since Flex, as an obvious parody, was legally considered to be a case of Fair Use, the lawsuit was settled in favour of DC. However, even though the creative team of Morrison and Quitely later released some critically praised and popular series (All-Star Superman being the best known of them), DC took many years to collect the Flex Mentallo mini. The origin story of Flex (where the Charles Atlas connection is much more obvious than in the mini-series) was actually collected in a 2006 Doom Patrol trade paperback, so clearly there was no remaining legal obstacle, but it took until April 2012 for the mini-series to be collected.. Only 16 years after it originally came out. The legal problems over Flex are probably why it took until the mid-2000s for the Morrison Doom Patrol run itself to get a proper trade paperback series, despite its high reputation.
• Supergirl: Most of her Pre-1985 adventures remained out of print for decades until her full Action Comics run and her Supergirl (1982) book were collected in trades in 2016, making available to the public the beginning and end of her history.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: IDW has scored the reprint rights to the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Mirage) and has begun putting out definitive collections: five-six hardcovers that collect the core "canon" of the series (the issues that Laird and Eastman did together) and a softcover line for the filler stories done by other creators in TMNT #15-18, 22-44).
• The 1980s Suicide Squad, a popular series which had super-villains being sent on black-ops missions in exchange for a full pardon for their crimes, remains uncollected, and plans for a black-and-white Showcase Presents reprint were scuttled by issues involving royalty rates for DC Comics published from 1976-96. These royalty rates also have screwed other Showcase titles such as Jonah Hex (Volume 2 can't be released because the issues that would be collected would contain issues published in this timeframe) and scuttled plans for Showcase volumes collecting "Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew" and "Who's Who in the DC Universe".
  • More specifically, DC royalty rates from this time period were for a fixed amount rather than a percentage of the cover price. Showcase Presents reprints a lot of issues at a low cover price, and the fixed amounts would make it unprofitable, so DC has to renegotiate everything.
  • While a color TPB ultimately did come out for the first nine issues, the second volume (effectively collecting everything in the aborted Showcase Presents volume) was cancelled a week before it was to come out and DC basically once again shelved the series.
  • The series has finally been completely re-released digitally, which tones down the issue regarding fixed amounts versus percentages. It's not a printed edition, but it's at last available.
  • And as of 2015, DC have been releasing print TPBs of the series.
• An infamous case is Hellblazer, which had huge chunks of the series uncollected. Although original series writer Jamie Delano's work is finally in the process of being reissued in trade paperback (as of 2010 everything from Issue #1 through "The Family Man" is available), not one issue of Paul Jenkins' forty-issue run on the title has been collected, despite this including some of the series' pivotal events such as Constantine's encounter with God, rescue of Astra from Hell, and creation of his own demon-self. This was finally corrected in 2016, with the reissue of Jenkins' complete run.
• When Fleetway went bankrupt, Rebellion snapped up the rights to 2000 AD and Judge Dredd Megazine, and Egmont took the rest, including Buster, Cor!!, Oink, Whizzer and Chips, Battle, Action, Lion, Valiant, New Eagle, Misty, Tammy, Jinty, and others. Egmont proceeded to sit on the rights for nearly 20 years until Rebellion bought out the rest of the archive in 2016 and established the Treasury of British Comics imprint to keep the classics in print.
• Sturmtruppen went unprinted for years, with many of the later strips being never released in the native Italy due the publisher shutting down (the series continued being published in Germany). This ended in 2015, with Italian publisher Mondadori re-released the entire series, including the strips never before published in Italy.
• Horst Rosenthal was a Jewish artist from Germany who fled to France to escape the Nazis. When Germany invaded France, he was forcibly interned at the Gurs prison camp before being transferred to Auschwitz and killed. But while at Gurs, he produced three comic books depicting life in the camp: A Day in the Life of a Camp Resident, The Little Guide to the Gurs Camp, and perhaps the most infamous, Mickey Mouse in the Gurs Internment Camp. They are some of the earliest comic books depicting the horrors of the Holocaust, and for decades they were kept out of the public eye. The family of a Gurs survivor who befriended Rosenthal had donated the books to a Paris historical society dedicated to documenting survivors testimonies, and it got a Colbert Bump after Art Spiegelman learned about the Mickey comic and discussed it in interviews as a precursor to Maus. For decades these works were only available to scholars until Memorial de la Shoah, the French Holocaust museum, published a collected version in 2014: Rosenthal may be gone, but his art lives on. May his memory be a blessing.