UP, UP, AND AWAY
Last year, my buddy living in rural Louisiana asked if I could get my hands on a new comic book series, TMNT The Last Ronin, and I’ve been happy to oblige. Upon his receipt of the second issue, he made a keen observation about the comic. "Dude, the prices on them are crazy!" he wrote me in our text thread. He wasn’t wrong. The Last Ronin is priced at a whopping $8.99 per issue. Yep, that’s right - basically nine dollars for a comic book!
About an hour later, I heard a similar comment, while I was perusing my local comic-book and games shop. A man was picking up an order for someone, and he said this of a new Superman title: "Six dollars for a comic book! What's it do? Read itself?" The clerk replied, "For that price, that's all it's gonna do, because I ain't buying it!"
This upswing in the cover prices of comic books is not a new phenomenon. It has been taking place for a number of years now. Just consider the astounding difference in price between a Superman comic released in 1982 and one on store shelves today, as pictured here. [Note: without the variant cover, which was also over-produced (a topic for another time), the Superman: House of El cover price is $5.99.]
This is also not the first time I have opined about such price inflation in comicdom. Indeed, just a few years ago, I made a similar post to this effect, but today, I am doing it from the perspective of the co-founder of an independent, comic-book company.
I do concede quickly that producing a comic is an arduous and costly endeavor, and the margins are not great. No, not even close to great. You pay for penciling, inking, coloring, lettering, printing, marketing, etc., and you may (emphasis on "may") take home a third of your retail price as net revenue to offset those costs. Yes, I said just a third. Comics have been an iconic American pastime for generations, but there isn't some grand path to riches for many of their creators. Even still, that doesn't seem to stop DC (now part of AT&T) and Marvel (now part of Disney) from trying to create one that leads right into readers' wallets.
When I say these prices scare me, I am not exaggerating. They generally do. These days, the traditional target demographic for comic-book publishers has a spate of options when it comes to entertainment choices. Reading comic books - let alone any books, really - has not ranked high on their list. And reading unnecessarily expensive comic books, with endless crossovers from one title to another, is just utterly nonsensical.
Sales of comic books and graphic novels, as reported by Diamond Comic Distributors, for the year ending 31 March 2021, decreased over 4%, leaving sales in the United States and Canada at $1.2 billion. The average cover price of comic books reached a high of $4.41 in the same period, when an extra-sized Wonder Woman comic was priced at $9.99, and when first issues of new, eponymous titles for Wolverine and The Flash were priced at $7.99.
The upswing in the cover price of comic books, continuing in the wake of COVID-19 and lockdowns that shuttered so many comic-book retailers, is troublesome. It could drive this medium even further into the dirt, if not completely render it extinct. And so I return to the words I wrote a few years ago: price inflation in a staid niche like the comic-book industry has systematically made comics less competitive with the likes of videogames, social media, streaming services, and other entertainment options, shrinking the target demographic of buyers. Consumers no longer identify their spending on comic books as convenience goods, when just one book can now cost as five bucks. Publishers would do better to understand this fact, and rather than try to squeeze every penny out of a ever-smaller number of buyers, these publishers should explore other ways to generate revenue. A failure to reign in the continuous run-up in cover prices will contribute to the slow, but certain, summary destruction of a whole industry and an iconic American pastime.
