Do you think comics publishers would ever commission series regular artists who missed issues and needed fill-ins to go back and re-do the missing monthly issues for trade consistency etc? I realize it would change the nature of the trade as a document-of-preservation but could make some multipart story-lines a lot less jarring and appear as originally intended. I also realize people are buying them “as is” but don’t singular artist trades sell better than random grab bag ones?

We’ve gotten part of the way there, with DC commissioning new pages for collected editions in the past (Final Crisis and We3 being the ones that immediately spring to mind, but I’m sure it’s happened with other collections) – they also had George Perez re-do pages from the Infinite Crisis series for collection, and Cameron Stewart re-drew Ashley Wood’s pages from The Invisibles for the final collection.

I’m sure it’ll happen eventually, if it’s not already been the case, but if/when it does, there’ll inevitably be those who’ll complain that either (a) they’re being punished for buying the single issues, or (b) the collection is somehow being unfaithful to the original incarnation of the story and demanding that the original version is also included in there somehow.