As much as I love the format, I don’t think it’s difficult to see that not much effort went into putting the tabloid comics together. This is especially true of Marvel’s regular series, Marvel Treasury Edition, which mostly consists of poorly chosen reprints thrown together between cardboard covers and printed at the larger size. Only very rarely did either Marvel or DC try brand new material, and even more rarely did they attempt to fully utilise the artistic possibilities of the larger canvas presented.
We did get newly-drawn covers though, and sometimes new art for contents pages or pin-ups. The above is the back cover for Marvel Treasury Edition #11, drawn by Jack Kirby.
Kirby, of course, had co-created the Fantastic Four back in 1961. He returned to Marvel in 1975 following a disappointing stint at DC. While he was willing to take up the reins of Captain America during Bicentennial year, and later produced a Black Panther run (and a Silver Surfer graphic novel — but more on that later), he otherwise refused all offers to work on other characters that he’d co-created during the 1960s (Steve Ditko would make much the same decision when he returned to Marvel later). He did, however, consent to producing a large number of covers during this period, many of which did feature old favourites.
©2010 Marvel Characters
I think the effort towards each issue of MTE varied: the mainstream superhero collections tended to be of the “greatest hits + whatever else fit” variety, but for their first Conan book, they made it like an early TPB edition by reprinting the entire “Red Nails” storyline.
In MTE #6, there was a great cross-section of Dr. Strange material, and the Howard the Duck book was done because it was so hard to find the early regular issues, again like an early TPB edition. With these and a few others, it seems like a bit more thought was involved.
The Red Nails one I’ll agree with you on. That was a beautiful book, especially coloured by Barry Windsor-Smith. But then you had the Team-Up, or Holiday Grab-Bag books that were a complete mish-mash. The only selling point for those was the size — which is, admittedly, still a large part of the appeal of the tabloid format.