The thing about trade paperbacks is that the monthly comics are loss-leaders for the trades.  The overhead cost of printing and distributing may be very close, but the monthly is where the talent is paid the earning wage.  I hear lots of folks say that they wish that the companies would just publish the trades as original graphic novels and bypass the monthlies.  But that would be so far from cost effective that it would completely obliterate the industry. 

For instance, six issues of Amazing Spider-Man are collected in a trade currently.  Whatever the cumulative current page rate for the writer, penciller, inker, letterer, and colorist on a 22 page comic is, it's covered by the print run and the monthly sales.  This dictates if it will be profitable to continue periodically.  Not counting any production costs outside of the previously mentioned talent, nor the editoral staff's salary,  I would grab a figure out of the air and say that it cost around $7500 to produce a single issue.  That's up front cost before any sales.  Multiply that by 6 and that's $45,000 for the creative content alone.  Factor in that the team responsible for this content are working for 6 months to produce just one trade paperback and not generating any revenue for the publisher during that entire production schedule and you have a financial nightmare. 

Currently, trade collections are no-brainer when it comes to profit.  Royalties paid to the original creative team are a fraction of the cost of buying new stories.  The market is held by both the bookstore crowd that are not buying the monthlies and the fans/collectors who are either waiting for the trade or buying the same thing they already bought once in a different format.  The only monkey wrench in the system that I can see is when trades reprint stories that pre-date current production and printing methods.  Therefore adding the cost of restoring/transferring to the necessary format for a re-release. 

I guess what I'm saying is that there is a line of caution to be drawn by the publishers.  Because a dead horse doesn't pull a cart very well. 

In France it is already done that way. I remember the first french comic book I bought had Spider-Man, Iron Man and Daredevil. 3 stories in one book.

F.

Nevertheless, Matt, you're talking about retailers nationwide essentially have to "re-rack" virtually their entire stores. I can't imagine that being welcomed as a great idea!

One problem I would forsee is in your Avengers/Captain America/Iron man book, what if I only like the Iron Man story and the rest don't float my boat?  I'm not going to continue to plunk down $8 for just that one story, no matter how great it is.

Something else that occurs to me as I type -- Marvel pretty much scuttled their graphic novel line when they turned it into the dumping ground for any old crap that happened to be lying around the office -- often material considered unworthy of the "real" titles. How long would it take before anthology books suffered a similar fate?