[...] a year later, she reconsidered, first announcing the strip’s ending, then making it a hiatus. Now, the wait is over! The strip is [...]

What many people forget is that just a few years later, DC once again raised their prices to 50¢ and added 8 more story pages (again, mostly through back-up stories, but within a few years the extra pages ended up become part of the main story); this time the increase worked and the price & page count stuck.

Later when they increased to 60¢, the story page count was increased to 27 pages!

Back in the day, an increase in price nearly always was accompanied by an increased in perceived value: either more pages, better quality paper, fewer ads, etc. Then as time went on, that value would be whittled away, until the next price increase and the cycle continued.

I see adding more pages with an accompanying price increase from $3 to $4 as being more tenable than Marvel’s “we’ll increase our prices to $4 on our top titles and you’ll smile and like it” approach. But then I’m probably sadly wrong…

Yet overall it didn’t seem to have a real… cohesive direction. It probably wasn’t helped by, at least from an outside view, being SO involved with all the various DC crossovers that came one right after another.

If I hadn’t already switched to trades on it, the $1 increase for Booster + adding a character I don’t like would have sent me running to trades.

I tried Jamie’s series, and it should have worked for me. Since I like teen characters, am from Texas and love original writer John Rogers Leverage TV show.

Yet it didn’t work for me, but I’m willing to admit that I really liked Ted Kord as well. (my one old fogie, can’t accept change moment?:) )

[...] prices accompanied by the addition of back-up features — seems a little familiar, blogger Johanna Draper Carlson notes that’s because it sort of happened at DC before, in the mid- to late ’70s: As [...]

[...] Webcomics | Cartoonist Jane Irwin is rethinking her earlier decision to end her historical webcomic Clockwork Comics because of her concerns over the depiction of racial stereotypes: “… I’m reconsidering my stance on permanently ending the book. Let’s call it a hiatus for now; the end of the first chapter’s a good stopping point. In any event, I need to pull back and do a lot more reading and researching, then re-evaluate the first half of the book to see if it’s something I can fix to better match the much darker tone of the second half.” [Clockwork Comics, via Johanna Draper Carlson] [...]

They also, as soon as I contributed, signed me up for their marketing email, constantly pushing me to buy ads and be part of “special issues”. That was annoying.

Don, you make the point in your comments that marketers should send review copies instead of news releases to reviewers, but I’m noticing more and more the opposite. DC, especially, seems to want coverage of upcoming comics based on what they say about it instead of actual content. I figure it’s fishing, seeing who’s interested, and a way to cut down their mailing costs.

Marvel was pumping out a lot of different titles in the late 70s, Carmine Infantino proposed to Stan a limit of titles their companies would put out. Stan refused, said if they titles were selling he would continue to pump out more books. Carmine was afraid the newsstands (with limited rack space) would reduce the amount of DC titles they carried to get the Marvel books. He felt once they lost that rack space it would really hurt the company and be difficult to get back. He responded by pumping out a bunch of titles, hence the DC explosion.

While I can see the value in charging a fee for an awards program in order to cover costs, for example, your original post about ForeWord‘s awards does make it clear that the fee charged was bringing in a lot more than just enough to cover the cost of the program. Your objections under those circumstances are quite merited.

BTW, Mr. Luedke has posted a response to some of my criticisms of his promotional material.

By the way, Johanna, how much do I owe you for the link? :) (Kidding! I’m kidding, folks!)