Two years ago, David Gabriel, a senior vice president at Marvel Comics, publisher of Spider-Man and the X-Men, was sitting in the company’s Fifth Avenue offices with a few colleagues trying to come up with a product tie-in for the Fantastic Four film to be released that summer — “something to get the extreme collector excited,” he said.

The result was The Fantastic Four Omnibus, Volume 1, which would seem to be the opposite of a disposable comic book costing a few dollars or less. The oversize coffee table-style 848-page book reprinted the first 30 issues of the original Fantastic Four - the comic created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1961. The book, which weighs 5.4 pounds, would retail for $99.99.

Gabriel’s rational - “We’d buy it” -proved right. Not only did people buy it, it sold out in a few weeks.

The comic industry has taken notice. Publishers have flooded direct-market comic shops and chains with high-end, high-priced editions. Marvel, owned by Marvel Entertainment, now has a dozen or so volumes of its Omnibus series, with plans for more tie-ins pegged to next summer’s films based on Iron Man and the Hulk.

“People who have the original comics want these editions,” said Gabriel. While sales of single-issue copies are down from the boom years of the early 1990s, the comic business as a whole has been rebounding, fuelled partly by the demand for high-end collections by an aging audience nostalgic for the comics of its youth.

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