Are Comics Too Expensive?
- Posted by Johanna on May 13, 2008 at 8:09 pm
- Category: LinkBlogging
Tom Spurgeon started it, kicking off with the feeling that $19 for 5 comics was too much. (Many of us sympathize, but we’re hooked on the habit.) He went on to consider pricing as it relates to various factions of the comic buying audience.
Surely the average, desirable, expected comics customer since the early ’80s — the person that pops to mind when someone says “comics reader” — is a person that buys a number of comics instead of just one or two. Here’s the thing: the price of serial comics right now makes sense for the reader that only buys one or two comics.
He also compares price points to a popular competitor for the customer dollar, manga.
A lot of folks seem to feel that buying x-amount of dollars in manga has a better chance to give you a more rewarding experience than buying x-amount of dollars in American comic books.
I certainly feel that way. Even when a manga volume is fully serialized — bringing you into the story in medias res and leaving you with a cliffhanger — there’s enough other stuff happening in the almost 200 pages to satisfy. When the same is true of a $3 (or more frequently these days, $4 due to a harder paper cover) American comic with 20+ pages of story, well, that just feels useless.
Spurgeon goes on to draw bigger conclusions as they result to the lack of ability for creators to develop their own visions and reputations outside of the superhero corporate structure. I don’t want to misrepresent him, so I encourage you to read it for yourself.
Alan David Doane connects pricing up with online file-sharing, pointing out that he won’t even bother reading some of this stuff for free. I generally share this opinion, but I will put in a quibble: torrenting isn’t free. It takes your time instead of your money, as you try to find the files and then wait for the downloads. Or, if you’re one of those people who have to read what you have available to you, you’re wasting your time keeping up on superhero universes for their own sakes.
Sean Kleefeld ties the pieces together by pointing out that we’re no longer paying for the entertainment or the experience but for having it in a tangible format. You pay only if you want a specific type of delivery — and more and more, you’re paying for having the old-fashioned paper format.
And that’s where Tom’s argument falls apart, I think. He recognizes the problem in the current, antiquated system, but doesn’t bring in the new/current business models that are replacing the status quo to see that we’re actually getting more creativity, more diversity, and at a lower sampling cost.
Is content doomed to be free?
May 13, 2008 at 9:28 pm
I think Kleefeld is wrong.
People still buy books. They buy lots of books. They even buy lots of manga. It may be that Amazon’s Kindle and such will eventually change that, but Alice in Wonderland notwithstanding most people aren’t reading content they could get online for free (let alone legally). The dominant paradigm is still that people are buying books including comics in order to read them.
If Burger King was failing while McDonald’s, Subway, and Pizza Hut were still chugging along should you immediately conclude that the problem is their outdated business model? Why, look at how Wolfgang Puck sells frozen pizzas at the supermarket so people don’t have to pay all the extra overhead for a physical restaurant and staff!
May 14, 2008 at 12:01 am
Tom’s analysis is imperfect; he points to rising prices as discouraging sampling of indy comics, when indy comic pamphlets really haven’t gone up in price in the past couple decades (15-20 years ago, they were priced at $2-$2.95, these days they’re $2.99-$3.99… that’s not even keeping up with inflation.) But the rising prices of mainstream comics (which were $1 20 years ago) does bite into the budget, and the pamphlets do have to compete with the squarebound formats.
May 14, 2008 at 12:04 am
The price of comics is what got me unhooked. When I was younger, I bought lots, but one day, I woke up and found that I had a particularly low paying job and could barely afford to eat let alone read comics, which even in 1988 were waaaay too expensive for what you got. I went for a year where I only bought Cerebus. By the end of the year, Cerebus was the only comic I cared about. Now I won’t buy regular comics because they cost twice what they did in 1988 and you still don’t get a lot for what you pay. I only deal with books now, because the volume and packaging match the price being asked for them.
May 14, 2008 at 10:58 am
Last week, amongst other things, I picked up Iron Man: Viva Las Vegas and Logan. They were both pretty good in their own ways but the cardstock cover didn’t justify the price hike.
Both of them together took about 10-15 minutes to read tops. I’m not sure that really justifies whatever the UK equivilant of $7.98 it cost me.
May 14, 2008 at 11:43 am
The price of comics (and the inane, endless events from the Big Two) hasn’t so much unhooked me as led me to discover the miracle of Inter-Library Loans. Most of what purchases I make these days are trades or a few series that I’m waiting to wrap up (All-Star Superman, Ex Machina, etc.).
May 15, 2008 at 7:06 am
The price of comics unhooked me too and I’ve always wondered if the cost keeps people away. Here in London, where I live, a $2.99 book is £2.00. Given the almost 2:1 exchange rate with the dollar, it should be £1.50 but it never is. So 5 comics for £10 (or $20) is expensive and you just have to be realistic about your spends.
The good thing that’s come out of it is, that waiting for certain books to be collected has changed my comicbook tastes. It’s been nice to wait for a book you really want, like DMZ or Jonathan Lethem’s Omega The Unknown; and also to be selective on writing quality, creative merit & the like. Libraries have also been a great way of catching up.
May 15, 2008 at 7:40 am