The V

I'd imagine it's sort of a similar-ish deal to Ellis & Cassaday on PLANETARY?

Titan have some sort of blanket deal for bookstore versions of DC comics I think... Jamie?

People keep buying Bob Marley's LEGEND every year, too.

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They do own-print versions of certain DC titles by mutual agreement, of which WATCHMEN is one. There shouldn't be any differences between the DC versions and Titan versions outside cover details (price, spine, ISBN) and indicia; even the cover and paper stock should match.

Its a pretty standard booktrade contract that rights revert to the author in the event of the book going out of print (ISTR usually after a set time limit).

Unfortunately for Moore, the book's been a consistent seller pretty much since publication and consequently has never gone out of print.

The only complaint that I think could be valid on that score would be if the initial or a subsequent print run on the book had been so colossal as to preclude the possibility of the book ever becoming unavailable, which could be construed as representing a bad-faith move on DC's part.

I should point out that for the most part, publishers try to avoid massively overprinting books as they don't make a lot of money if they're remaindered; there are storage charges for unsold copies; and pulping unsold, unremaindered books costs the publisher money. (This is how Dorling Kindersley UK fucked themselves over when they printed a metric fuck-ton of STAR WARS: THE PHANTOM MENACE visual guides and associated stuff which - perhaps unsurprisingly - didn't sell.)

The tweak in the Watchmen case is they thought reversion would be 12 months after issue #12 came out - no-one expected there to be a paperback at all, let alone one that would legitimately stay in print for 22 years.

Ah, yeah, I recall something like that. Caveat contractor, I guess.

"when they printed a metric fuck-ton of STAR WARS: THE PHANTOM MENACE visual guides and associated stuff which - perhaps unsurprisingly - didn't sell"

Probably seemed like an awesome idea in 1998, though.

Welcome to publishing! Hope you survive the experience!

"Hundreds of photos! Ships! Little boy Darth Vader! And that new frog guy, whatsisname, Zig Zag Bunk or something, sure to be a hit. It's like printing money! The nerds will just ask us to take their wallets now!"

I'm pretty sure that was how the meeting in question went, yeah...