Newsarama reports that during the Q&A part of the DC Nation panel at this weekend’s Baltimore Comic-Con, a fan asked:

Are there more Legion, Flash or Justice League Archives coming? [VP of Sales Bob] Wayne said that when you get up to the issues that can be affordably bought by collectors the demand for the Archive Editions goes down.

Okay, this might apply to the Silver-Age material. The four Flash Archives books so far are up to Flash #132 (1962). When I was tracking down back-issues in the #133–140 range (the likely contents of a hypothetical book 5) about 6 or 7 years ago, I seem to remember finding reasonably good copies in the $5-15 range. (Better copies, of course, run into triple digits.)

But there’s still 8 years of Golden-Age material to cover, from 1942–1949: more than 75% of Jay Garrick’s solo run. And those books are much harder to find, with battered readers’ copies often selling for $40–150.

Moreover, those 8 years include the first appearances of every major Golden-Age Flash villain. The current 2 volumes of The Golden Age Flash Archives only make it through Flash Comics #24 and All-Flash #2. The Shade, the first real supervillain to grace the series’ pages, didn’t appear until Flash Comics #33. The Fiddler, the Thinker, the Turtle, the Rag Doll—even the original Rose & Thorn and Star Sapphire all made their appearances during those years, and haven’t shown up in the archives yet.

In fact, the only Golden-Age villain to get the archive treatment for his original appearances is the Rival, who showed up in Flash Comics #104 (the final issue of the series), and whose story was (oddly) included in the silver-age Flash Archives vol. 1.

Even when you factor in the golden-age stories that got reprinted in later Flash books, the “Greatest Stories” collections, and the occasional anthology series like DC Super-Stars, 75% of the stories have never been reprinted* since the 1940s.

I’ve been looking for Golden-Age issues for almost 2 years now, and by focusing on All-Flash (which typically included 3–4 short stories or 1 long one), I’ve managed to hit 50%. It’s gotten harder, largely because I’m less willing to pay the big bucks for random issues than for issues with specific characters.

Now, there is of course a question of whether there’s a demand for the material at all…but when a beat-up reader’s copy of a book goes for more than the archive would cost on Amazon, I’d say there’s no risk that the availability of back issues will interfere with the market for the archive.

(Expanded from a comment I made in the subsequent forum thread.)

*104 stories in Flash Comics, 1 in the Flash Comics Miniature edition, 29 in Comic Cavalcade, 71 stories in 32 issues of All-Flash, 3 completed but unpublished until years later = 208 total. Of those, 32 have appeared in the GA Flash and Comic Cavalcade Archives, 1 in the Silver Age Flash Archives, and another 16 in various other books. Just 49 out of 208. Only 23.5% It’s a little harder to go by issues instead of stories, since some issues of All-Flash have only partially been reprinted, but it seems to be roughly 41 out of 169 — which works out to 24.3%.