It’s hard now to evoke what a sea change it was, June 23, 2010. Dual articles by Laura Hudson on ComicsAlliance led with “The wait is over” and “finally” at DC’s announcement that they would begin to distribute digital comics, with “day and date” release of their newest issues. My own reaction piece called it “a date like June 1938 when Superman first appeared — a date after which comics were never the same again.” (Don’t laugh — a bunch of you were equally breathless!)

Some of my concerns at the time, if not original, were prescient; I wondered aloud what might happen if Comixology went out of business? Other qualms have long since been resolved — the then-small backlist has ballooned to thousands of comics; digital trades, not included in the June announcement, had arrived by that October. Nowadays, “day and date” collections are available just the same as their single issue counterparts.

Mostly.

Digital is for keeps(-ish)

There was a good run of it for a while, particularly in the last decade, of DC collecting series that hadn’t yet before appeared in trade. We had Mike Grell’s Green Arrow, beginning in 2013 and collecting Grell’s whole run, completing with the ninth volume in 2018. Same for John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad in eight volumes from 2015 to 2019. And then, near unprecedented, DC collected about the entire post-Crisis runs of Batman and Detective Comics — Caped Crusader and Dark Knight Detective respectively — starting in 2018 and finishing in 2023, 14 volumes total.

Unfortunately, a lot of times when the later volumes of these came out, the earlier volumes were out of print, hard to find, and expensive. I sympathized, but I also took a lot of comfort in knowing that through all that time, the books were also available digitally. Preferences as to how people like to read vary, access is inconsistent (to both physical and digital storefronts), but the bottom line is that the books were there somewhere perpetually. Out of print didn’t mean gone.

Reign of the DC Finest

And then in 2024 came the DC Finest line. The output is gobsmacking — Batman volumes on their way to collect the same as Caped Crusader and Dark Knight Detective plus more; Catwoman volumes with over 10 years of mostly uncollected modern stories; brain-bleedingly complete collections of the Crisis on Infinite Earths, Legends, and Zero Hour crossovers; even more complete Grell Green Arrow books; even more complete Ostrander Suicide Squad books; Peter David’s uncollected Supergirl; and more. Truly some of the most thoughtful, impressive collections of DC’s material that I’ve ever seen.

And about none of it is available digitally.¹

Don’t get me wrong. These days, in the very same week a regular series collection comes out, I usually have the option of either going to buy it at my local comics shop or purchasing it instantaneously for my digital device. That’s fantastic, a real realization of the future, and if regular series collections were always the only books DC offered in digital, thank you, that would be enough.

But when I take out “likely digital” regular series collections from the recent DC Comics Spring 2027 catalog, and the Elseworlds and current miniseries and whatnot, looking for 1980s–1990s DC Comics that’ll be collected and made available in digital, there’s basically none in the next year. Just none.

DC Finest will release modern Batman and Catwoman, Batgirl Cassandra Cain, and entries for Hitman and Crisis on Infinite Earths and Legion of Super-Heroes, and digital will see none of that. The new Millennium Omnibus is very exciting, but at the same time I despair, because no way will that get broken down into reasonably sized trades that might also be released digitally. It’s surely destined to become a DC Finest.

And so it is

DC obviously knows their revenue streams. If there was money in releasing DC Finest books digitally across all vendors (or in a variety of other configurations that would result in digital publication), they would do it.

And as I’ve noted before, print is a terrible revenue model — expensive to manufacture, expensive to ship, expensive to store. For DC to be doubling down on print, the anthesis of that day in June 2010, things must be going really well or the revenue advantages must be really clear.

First, I want a healthy DC Comics that’s making money and publishing books. Second, I’d like to be able to read what I want to read, when and how I want to read it. There was a good pipeline for a while from omnibus to trade (or vice versa), and even if I missed a book in print, it would still be available digitally. That’s not true any more, and it concerns me.