I know nothing of the comics business, other than what I've read here. But didn't the company Eaglemoss just recently do a high-profile collection of (almost?) all the Trek comics, including the 80s stuff? And before that, there was the GIT complete digital collection (which I have). Maybe between both of those earlier releases, they don't think there'd be much of a market left?
I think the Eaglemoss partwork goes for a different market than I'm imagining here. I never would sign up for that, way too much stuff, some of which I already owned, some of which I didn't want to own. Surely it ran thousands of dollars for a complete set? But a nice DC movie-era omnibus (or two? I don't remember how many issues there were) would be a one-time payment of a couple hundred, which comics collectors do all the time.
Didn't IDW do some reprints of DC's Trek stuff years ago? I seem to recall sometime around 2009 or 2010 IDW reprinted The Worst of Both Worlds.
IDW did reprint some old comics in their “Archives” collections.
The Worst of Both Worlds was reprinted in The Best of Borg
Eaglemoss did publish many of the old DC Comics, but disappointingly while did all of the TNG comics and Volume 1 of TOS, they never finished Volume 2 - that I would still love to see collected in some fashion
Not so recently! the Eaglemoss collection ran 2016-2020 and had all sorts of problems, with some story reprints missing pages, terrible reproduction, some poor choices of curation and sequencing etc.
I 100% agree that IDW have missed a massive opportunity in not collecting, in thorough compendiums, the DC material and even Malibu. 60th anniversary of the franchise would have given it more attention too. I am sure they would argue sales wouldn't be high enough, but they have never tried a complete series reprint - the occasional 'best of' volume is not indicative of interest in a complete reprint...
IDW often start reprint series but 1) they always fizzle out, and 2) they often spend their time recollecting stuff that doesn't need to be recollected.
There was
Star Trek Omnibus, which ran three volumes of archival material (they also did two volumes of their own material): the original Marvel run,
Early Voyages, and the film adaptations. This set was great, even if the reproduction was sometime spotty and it had IDW's usual lack of care to detail (one issue is credited to "Mary Wolfman," not Marv). But neither the Marvel run nor
Early Voyages had ever been collected before, and the film adaptations never released in a single volume—and IDW even commissioned a
ST II adaptation to fill that gap. I'm guessing these didn't sell super well because this was all we got.
The
Star Trek Archives were okay. Instead of 15-plus issues in a collection, you got just six or so, which means collecting a long-running series is either going to require buying a bazillion trades or fizzle out before it finishes. A lot of the material they collected had just been reprinted by Titan in their "Comics Classics" reprints: the
Best of Peter David,
Best of Gary Seven, and
Best of Captain Kirk volumes all had significant overlap with those. If the
Best of Klingons volume had been published, it would have had the same issue. If your Target audience is people willing to pick up collections of archival materials, odds are they already picked up the "Comics Classics" volumes!
They then started a chronological reprint series... which meant that its first two volumes were largely made up of
Early Voyages, which they'd already reprinted. And that was it, just two volumes. (Presumably because people like me didn't buy it, because they'd already bought the relevant
Star Trek Omnibus volume.)
They also did a new collection of the Gold Key comics, but got up to issue #31 by the fifth and final volume... while Checker's reprint series of the same got up to issue #43 in five volumes, so they never reprinted anything Checker hadn't. (And thus, I never bought any of them.)
Finally, there were the
Star Trek Classics, which were mostly just straight reprints of collections previously published by Wildstorm.
At this point, I am deeply skeptical of any new IDW reprint series; I feel like it's guaranteed to last just two volumes and mostly reprint material previously reprinted. (Maybe they will give us a fifth collection of the "Mirror Universe Saga" for the two guys who missed all the other ones.)
