[Groop] Groo Treasury

[Mark Evanier]

Alexander Durnan wrote:

> Why continue the Treasury into a series?  Wouldn't it just be easier to 
> reprint Groo Adventurer, Bazaar, etc.?  Honestly I'd prefer a nice 
> hardcover on the lines of the Marvel Masterworks series.  The Omnibus 
> editions of those get you like 30 issues per book!  Groop members would 
> probably buy it, public at large might be a gamble.

ME: We spent a lot of time discussing how to handle the reprints, and 
Dark Horse has some firm ideas about what the marketplace wants.

The current plan is to continue the "alphabet" series but not to reprint 
the early ones.  THE GROO PARADE will reprint the next eight issues of 
Epic and, assuming it sells decently, it will be followed by an "R" 
volume with the next eight.  (Sergio and I are having a disagreement 
over what to call the "R" volume.  He wants to call it THE GROO REGIME 
and I want to call it THE GROO REPRINT.)

There are a number of reasons not to reprint THE GROO ADVENTURER, THE 
GROO BAZAAR, etc.  One is that that page count is not really cost 
effective these days.  That's why THE GROO PARADE will have eight issues 
instead of four.  If we stuck with the four issue paperbacks, they'd 
look overpriced next to the eight issue ones.

So the early stories will get reprinted in the TREASURY series.  The 
first volume will have all the pre-Epic stuff plus a bunch of new 
features.  Sergio is drawing a six-page introduction with him and me in 
it.  There will also be some early GROO pages that were printed overseas 
but not in America.

Assuming the first TREASURY sells well enough to warrant continuing the 
series, we'll reprint the early Epic stories sequentially.  I know most 
of you have all those but the average reader doesn't.  We think it will 
help the sales of new GROO projects if average readers have an easy way 
to buy all the back ones.

I know this is not ideal and part of me feels bad about, in essence, 
asking some of you to buy reprints of stories we've already reprinted. 
But I also like the idea of getting the whole GROO saga in print and 
this seems like the best way to do it.