I've been looking at my Would U Buy It blogs the last few days, and I need to change things up a bit. Such as:

Bigger Books

One of the biggest problems throughout this series has been the page count. Because some trades have had problems with the contents coming away from the spine, leaving the cover detached, I've been hesitant to suggest bigger volumes. I've instead broken bigger stories up into multiple volumes. Now though, I think that things like DC's Showcase Presents trades, Marvel's Epic and Essential trades, and various omnibus and compendium collections have shown that bigger collections can be had without sacrificing the cover upon reading. So, I want to suggest some bigger trades in this series. Not all of them, but some.

The end of 12-Month Trades/ All In Trades

I've tried out a couple of different ideas for collecting whole series. The first was 12-Month Trades (12-MT)- collecting series a year at a time. The yearly-trade thing wasn't working great- not all series had exact yearly counts after all. So, I changed that to All In Trades (AIT) so I could get away from the rigid year-per-book rule I had set for myself.

With AIT, I tried to gather several issues per trade, keeping story arcs together. I was still worried about the size though, due to the detaching spine problem. I've felt this was holding back the feasibility of the collections, because it demanded too many trades for some series. That is, I felt that while some series were worthy of trades, buyers were more likely to buy something that came in fewer volumes. I could be way off base there, but I'd like to suggest some bigger trades here as well.

Then there's this: if I'm going to suggest bigger volumes for some trades, then there's really no need to do the AIT series separate from WUBI. So I'm ending 12-MT/AIT at twelve entries, and any future ideas of that type will be done as a WUBI. I like Would U Buy It better as a title anyway.

Change to the WUBI title

This thing is minor, but it's been bugging me. When I started doing WUBI, I messed up and left the question mark out of the title. I hate it. So, as of WUBI #101, the title changed from Would U Buy It to Would U Buy It?. I may get bored and go back and do a retroactive fix to the first hundred, but right now that's not on my agenda.

Revisiting old WUBI's

With this idea of suggesting bigger trades, I may do WUBI's that revisit some previous ideas, and change up the issue counts per trade.

Something I've done in past WUBI's is try to use old titles on collections as a way for DC or Marvel to keep the copyrights current on those titles. Kind of the way DC is using Showcase Presents on its black-and-white trades now. I still think that's something viable they can do, but the few times they've actually published a trade I suggested that had that kind of name change, they've always gone with the title originally on the story.

For example, I had suggested a Deathstroke story under the title Brave & the Bold, because the story featured Batman. When DC published the trade though, it was under the Deathstroke title. So, I'll probably quit suggesting title changes like that as my first choice. I probably should have kept them as alternate title suggestions anyway. I may even bring some trade suggestions back for a second look in new WUBI's, changing up titles to fix these problems.

There's also a few suggestions that I now feel were maybe too ambitious, so I'll probably revisit those in an effort to be more realistic about the proposal. One I can think of right away is Batman: Year One to One Hundred. A) That's probably never going to happen, and B) I really proposed that one as a way to get Batman: Year Three into TPB. What seems logical now then is to revisit that idea, and suggest Batman: Year Three on its own, or Batman: Year One, Two, and Three without Year One Hundred. In fact, I think that's going to be WUBI #102.

Plus 1 and TPXtras

Back when I did all the What If? WUBI's, I kept thinking that it would be cool to see some existing trade collections get new editions with the related What If? issue, kind of like alternate endings on a DVD. Originally, I called this idea Plus 1 TPB's, because I was thinking of literally adding one issue to existing trades. Now, that's just going to be Plus 1. However, some collections could use more than one issue as extras, so at those times, instead of "Plus 1," it will be TPXtras (aka TPX)

An example of one I thought of, but Marvel beat me to it, is the X-Men: Dark Phoenix Saga Complete Collection. It's the same "Dark Phoenix Saga" TPB, but with What If? #27 and Phoenix: The Untold Story (and extras I didn't even know about). That's cool! So some future WUBI's will probably be this kind of idea.

Why all these changes?

A couple of reasons. One is some of these changes have been rolling around in the back of my mind for some time now. The other is that DC and Marvel have really stepped up their TPB game in the last few years, and they're finally starting to mine the Eighties and Nineties material that I was going to for my WUBI's. Bottom line: they've made it harder for me to find stuff they haven't done! That's a GREAT thing!

So, that's all I've got. If you actually read all of this, then you must like the behind-the-scenes/thought process stuff as much as I do. If not, then... well, you're not reading this, so what am I doing? On to WUBI #102!

As always, thanks for reading, and thanks for stopping in! :^D

-Chris Bishop (aka cbishop/ FicOPedia/ BumpInTheNight)