If there actually were a whole mess of kids clogging the new release aisle every Wednesday, I imagine it would be a test of willpower (the real kind, not the Hal Jordan kind) to withstand the temptation to grab a couple of ruffians and, with all the frothing spittle one expects from clichéd lunatics, say something along the lines of "You little scamps don't know how good you got it!"

Wait, what?

Aren't super-hero fans supposed to stay up late, pounding out feverish, misspelled mission statements on what Should Be Done regarding the stewardship of the Justice Society franchise? Aren't we all checking our Google reader to see how many signatures our e-petition to bring back the original Crimson Fox has received? Seriously, how many handwritten letters have you written today regarding Brand New Day?

While all that stuff is well and good—look, if you don't enjoy getting flustered and red-faced while arguing the ins and outs of super-hero comics that you just don't like, because they are getting the Mirror Master all wrong, then you're definitely missing out on one of the best parts of buying the books—still, when you ignore the constant streams of fury directed at just about every book that regularly comes out, there's one area of the local comic shop that has never looked better. And that, my friend, is the reprint section.

I'm not sure when this Golden Age of gorgeous reprints started—for me, it definitely wasn't with the DC Archives or Marvel Masterworks, two imprints which have completely dispensed with the idea of quality for the sake of quantity. (Atom reprints? Yeah, okay, but why?) If I was forced under threat of Omega Beams to choose, then my personal starting mark would probably be the Krazy Kat volumes, with ably designed covers by comic's wunderkind Chris Ware, published by Fantagraphics. From there, the ground opens up a bit, with Peanuts, Popeye, and Drawn & Quarterly's superb hardcover collections of Gasoline Alley. For the first few months, DC and Marvel seemed to be ignoring the competition, content to fill direct market shelves with more expensive additions to their existing lines, few of which contained what people were clamoring for. (Seriously, how many volumes of the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents does any one consumer need?) Then, like a sack full of extraordinarily expensive bricks, Marvel drops the oh-so-pristine, and oh-my-god-it's-expensive, Fantastic Four Omnibus, right around the same time they pretended they really liked what Grant Morrison did with the X-Men by producing a massive collection of that as well. Sure, you could buy this stuff in other formats—but who would want a bunch of black and white Essential compilations of the Four when they can get a ninety-nine dollar brick of comics? In a thousand different ways, Stan & Jack's classic stories were finally given the archival treatment of over-the-top action in the sturm and drang presentation it had always deserved. From there, the pipeline has gotten a bit more random—old Iron Man comics aren't going to set the world on fire, and there's better periods of the Uncanny X-Men then the ones recently published, but if Marvel is going to help put out a Devil Dinosaur hardcover, who are we to judge?

DC, as seems to be their business plan lately, was caught sleeping by the Omnibus onslaught—but when they hit the ground last year, they hit it running. Jack Kirby's Fourth World is, without a doubt, a series that had been demanding a serious collection for years. Yet all that was available, besides a back-issue hunt, was a series of poorly put together black and white trade paperbacks—and if there's one thing Kirby's work for DC lived and died on, it's the four color combination of outfits and insanity that laced his mythological masterpiece. Even then, you could have known every page of the Fourth World saga and you'd still be blown away by the care and devotion put out for these volumes. (Well, unless you're part of that weird minority obsessed with the paper stock.) When they finished up the series this year, DC turned out, in quick succession, a complete volume of OMAC, and yes, that's the One Man Army Corps, also by Kirby, and finally got around to making sure that people had an opportunity to take a look at Starman, the critically acclaimed super-hero series by James Robinson that is one of the few arguments comics fans can use to point out that 90's DC wasn't all Bloodlines alongside a crying Waverider. Meanwhile, the rumors on the pipeline imply that, yes, there's more coming. Garth Ennis' original satirical run on Punisher drops near the end of the year, and DC still have plenty of Kirby work on the way, now that the rails have been thoroughly greased.

It's easy to make the case that, with so many classic works hitting the stands, it crowds the market and does a disservice to the super-hero books that are making their first entrance into the market. It's easy because it feels true sometimes—if you come late to work on Thursday, bleary eyed after a night spent reading about Orion treating Kalibak like a meat punching bug, only to be reminded that, oh yes, Countdown was another disappointment, then of course you're going to be blog-ready to complain about the "State of Things." Here's the thing though: bad comics? They're always bad. They aren't bad because you're comparing them to the Holy Grail. They're bad for a hundred other reasons, but that's not even on the shopping list. And while reading Jack Kirby may just make you the snobby comic fan who lets out big sighs when you hear somebody praise Neil Gaiman's take on The Eternals, after admitting they have never laid eyeballs upon the original, no great comic book reprint is going to ruin the entertainment you'll find when a testy gorilla picks up a machine gun to take down a few Skrulls. If that does happen—well, you were just lost to begin with.