A Comic Protest?
 

I know that I am not the only one here that thinks 2.99 is insane considering...

3 comics (mostly ads)
bags+boards

...runs around 10 bucks. Do you think if we followed the gas protest schedule for May 15th, not buying ANY comics, statutes, etc...on Wed May 16 (release day) it would make the publishers rethink prices? When the major gas protest happened May 15, 1997 it made the gas companies drop their prices overnight. Would it make publishers atleast cut back to 2.75? Thoughts?

This won't work. Why? Because everybody will buy their comics the next day anyway, so the publishers still make the same $$$ for sales.

I don't think so. Link?

You're just hurting your LCS owner, not the publishers. This only works if people collectively tell their LCS not to order comics for them for a specific "no comics" month, and then the orders would drop, and that's what would impact publishers' bottom lines.

But comic book readers/collectors would have a hard time skipping a month of comics, continuity and all that.

I've never heard of any of these one day gas protests causing anything to happen. I agree, it's only going to hurt your LCS. Although this will hurt your LCS too, if you want to protest high prices, stop buying them (or cut down on what you're buying). Also, if you want to protest something like terrible writing or art in your favorite comic, don't buy it. It's ok, I know you've been collecting every issue for the past 20 years, but the gap in your collection won't kill you, promise.

I don't think a one day strike would have any effect (affect?, I am always unsure on that).

But I do wish something was done. I've rambled about this a few times here with little response, but I seriously think that comic prices must come down for the industry to approach the size it used to be. When I was a kid I could mow one lawn and buy twenty comic books. I did some inflation math a while ago, and figured out that comics should be about $1.75 right now.

That sounds about right if comic price increases directly correlate to inflation. However, I think the real reason for the huge price increase is that the talent (writers/artists) demand a huge salary (otherwise they wouldn't be working in comics). So if following inflation comics should be 1.75 times what their price was 15-20 years ago, the reason they are 3 times the price is that the writers/artists get a salary 5-10 times what they were getting 15-20 years ago.

Well, the gas companies are making obscene profits and paying their CEO's hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses. How are the comic companies doing?

Maybe their prices are so high because they need to be.

Personally, I'm shocked at the price of paperback books.

Yeah, haven't bought a paperback in years, but didn't someone recently say that they were about 10 to 15 bucks?

$7.99 for mass market paperbacks and something like $12-$15 for Large Print. I have no clue about HC, though.

True, inflation isn't the same for every industry.

But I'm sure that the incredible rise in prices is a big reason why the comic industry is a tiny fraction of what it used to be. I just found better inflation calculators online, and 20 cents back in 1970 is about a dollar today. So I know it all doesn't work this way, but comic books "should" cost $1.00 today.

Back in the fifties thru seventies, comic books were everywhere. My tiny little home town had at least twenty places to buy comics, every grocery store, every drug store, every 7-11, the one book store, and the one toy store. Prices were ten to twenty cents each. Comics had circulations up to three million per title, with even low sellers approaching 200,000.

Today, my home town has one place to buy comics, the comic book store. Comics are $3 each. Circulations are usually 50,000 or less (the top being maybe 150k, right?).

Now, I know that the entertainment industry has changed, the fields have merged to a degree. And talent gets paid a lot more today. And maybe if we tried to force things back to where comics were cheaper the quality would suffer too much.

But I still think that big mistakes were made over the last 25 or so years, and the industry has suffered hugely. We need to get kids back into comics, and get prices lower.

Didn't the exponential price increase happen partly because of the shift to glossy paper?

I started reading comics in the early '90s when they were a dollar, and pretty much stopped in the late '90s. At that point, more comics started to be printed on glossy paper. I remember those prices being much higher than "normal" comics.

They went to glossy paper and then went back and added some pages. Then I think they dropped the pages and kept the price. And then prices went up again and they have been playing the paper game since. I still don't know what kind of paper I'm gonna get when I buy a comic.

Yeah I don't like the prices but I remember the days of cheap paper comics and I could never go back because I like the way the glossy heavy paper looks.

Actually, I could go back but I'd probably buy less.

i agree comics are damn expensive.

Heavy slick paper, with computer coloring helps justify the price for me. And DCBS :)

I would rather them go back to the cheap newsprint paper and non digital coloring if it would reduce prices. Still, i don't buy many titles these days so I'm not at a point where i would consider "protest".

Isn't part of the problem that they are now selling to a much smaller audience than before and must sell each individual issue at a higher price to make up for the lost readership?

There used to be a lot of advertisements in comics. How much advertising do they have now?

Pretty much every other page.

I don't know about DC, but Marvel has just about as much advertising as it always has. However, it seems like a good majority of the ads in Marvel comics are for really crappy Marvel related merchandise... like Spider Man pajamas, hulk phone cards, captain america school supplies, or Ghost Rider milkshakes. It all looks really cheap and terrible.

:drool:

Most of the paperbacks I read are between $6.99 and $7.99 - doesn't seem to bad to me for what I consider to be a disposable product.

Wasn't gas like 89 cents a gallon in 1997? LOL

Anyway I am perfectly content ordering on DCBS and getting most comics around 1.75 - the magic number posted above.

Yes, don't buy any comics in protest, which will not hurt Marvel or DC in the slightest, but could really screw over your local comic book shop - the store that has nothing to do with the prices.

BRILLIANT!!!!!!!!!

Sorry, as a small business owner, this "don't buy (whatever) on a certain day" bullshit just pisses me off because it's sheer ignorance.