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I'll be the first one to admit it. I'm a hardcover comic book trade snob. If I had to put the three ways you can get comic books in order of how I would like to get them, then it would be the following:
Hardcover trade
Softcover trade
Regular single issues
I don't know why I like hardcover trades so much.
I know for regular books I could go with the hardcover or the paperback of the book about the same. I think in this case I place the paperback ahead of the hardcover because it is a lot easier to transport and read on the bus/train when I need to get somewhere. You don't see a lot of people lugging around the latest popular hardcover books on mass transit now do you?
For comics it is an entirely different animal. When faced with buying either the trade hardcover or softcover, the hardcover will always win out. DC's "New 52" is the perfect example of this. I would much rather own the hardcover of "Action," or any of the Batbooks than the softcover.
To me, the hardcover trade just seems more durable than the softcover or regular issues. That durability is something that you need in a comic book trade that will be read over and over and traded around among friends who like to share comics. The hardcovers also have better production values than the softcover. The comic company takes its time putting it together and getting it out. You also might get something like a slipcase to store it in if it is a trade of something special. I also find that if I need to reference something in one of the hardcovers it is a lot easier to go up to a shelf and pull down the one that I want rather than try to wade through a sea of paperbacks and pulling out three of them along with the one that I wanted and making a mess all over the floor.
That's not to say that I am above getting the softcovers of the trades. I'm not rejecting over half of the first volumes of the "New 52" trades because they are softcovers. Some of those softcovers are of some of the best titles DC Comics has put out in a long time, and I'm not going to cut myself from those just because they are not a hardcover book. IDW has put out 15 volumes of the Marvel "GI Joe" comics trades in softcover and for the longest time that was the only way you could get all the issues without having to go onto the secondary market. That is until late last year when IDW started releasing hardcovers of GI Joe trades with the issues printed in order of release. That includes the "Special Missions" and "Yearbooks" issues. For about the first three or four hardcover trades you'll have the main book before they start putting in the "Special Missions" issues. I know there were some crossovers between the two books and this would make them a lot easier to read rather than read an issue in one trade and try to figure out what issue to read next in another trade. Also in the GI Joe hardcovers they include some commentary by Larry Hama and introductions to the issues by a 'GI Joe expert'. I'm guessing this is something similar to the "Transformers Classics" trades where they have comments before each issue they print about something special in the issue.
I will grant you there are some drawbacks to having hardcovers. Comic companies sometimes don't think through their decisions on what to use to bind the book or what kind of spine to use (Flat versus rounded). This caused a spate of posts on the internet in comic book forums that people's hardcover trades were falling apart from gluing the book to the cover rather than sewing it to the spine and cover. These were not cheap hardcovers either. These were the $100+ Omnibus editions of some titles. I'd get my hackles up too if I spent that much on a trade hardcover and it fall apart within a week of me starting to read it. The spine choice also affects how the trade is received. Some of the trades mentioned above that were not falling apart were having an issue with staying open. The spine was the wrong kind of spine. It was the kind that when you laid the book open on a table for everyone to look at; it would close itself because of the spine.
The only drawback I have to getting trades is not even with the trade itself. It's the lack of history that a trade has. What I mean by "lack of history" is that when you buy single issues, you get the ads with the book and this gives you kind of a glimpse into what was going on in the comic book world during that time. I have an almost complete run of GI Joe comics (I'm short maybe about 20 issues) and as I was going through and reading them when I was a freshman in college, I noticed that the advertising was very different than the ones I was buying back then. Back then they had advertisements for everything from sports cards, video games and national comic book dealers that you could order back issues or current issues.
In comics these days you have the Army advertising on the back cover or on the inside as well as for things like backpacks shoes, milk and (or depending on the age group) really violent videogames. What happened to the comic book dealers advertising? I guess the internet has kind of made that old hat now. It also seems that the advertisers have gone to other mediums to get their name out there to the nerds because a lot of the comics I have looked at recently had a lot of in house advertising.
I guess that my being a hardcover trade snob is not that bad. They are good quality (when the publisher gets them made right) and give you a little insight into what went on in the making of the original comic book. I know all comic book fans like that sort of behind the scenes thing. I get the issues for an entire storyline in one (or two) trades that cost about the same as the entire run of the six issues (minimum) from the shelves of a comic book store, and you don't have to shell out the extra money for the alternate cover if you are into that sort of thing. It's all right there in one hardcover or softcover package.
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