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Current Comic Book Prices to Go Up?!

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OK, so I read in the latest "Walking Dead" reader's column that Marvel is jumping prices to the newstand from 2.99 to 3.99...I'm confused...I thought that these were all direct only?

 

Also, given that Independent titles typically charge more (fewer copies produced, higher production costs)...what will this mean to comic book prices in general?

 

Also, does anyone know if DC has followed suit or have more information in general about this?

 

Thanks!

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from Rich Johnston

 

LITG

 

if you read down that column abit you will see It is already affecting the UK

 

 

and from Brian Hibbs, Tilting at windmills, Dec 19 and nov 14 columns

Tilting

 

as I have said before, here and other places, TPB's are the wave of the future in the comic industry, however, if ebooks ever catch on and become more $$ friendly, then that will be the way comics will drift....

:devil:

 

 

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:thumbsup:

TPB's are definetly the wave of the future, i don't understand why they can't hire a team to produce a tpb, then pay them for that, print them individually if they like and then sell the TPB instead of trying to make a continual run of comics that artists figure i'm here for 12 issues i'll try to make it a tpb esque story and then they package it up.

 

continuity, just give me a good story or charge less!\

 

And as for ebooks the number of dubious legality scans available on the internet already shows how many people access their comics electronically.

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See, your talkin all illeagle and stuff...

I talking an ebook reader, where your monthly comics are downloaded wifi, once a month for ablut a $1.00 a book, graphics and all...

A subscription service provided by the publishers, can you say goodby retailers......

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And as for ebooks the number of dubious legality scans available on the internet already shows how many people access their comics electronically.

Where can you get these scans and ebooks?

 

Well, through less than legal means...

 

search for your comic and add the word "torrent"... a client like UTorrent can download files in pieces from multiple sources and there are those which "seed" these files for people to download.

 

I personally use it as a means to read my Walking Dead books, as I have multiple copies sent to my house each month I don't want to disturb my copies. It's also been a way for me to "taste" other books; and if they interest me I do add them to my pull list.

 

So, basically it seems that they are going to find the "breaking" point for readers and maximize profits; this may help push the industry to electronic and/or TPB production. I'm personally good with going towards both as this would change the way how stories are developed and told which would reduce some constraints. I'm still in favor of the printed medium though but if I had to let it go I would. My stance on printed comics has weakened considerably over the last twelve months as the convenience of electronic consumption has been met favorably by my desire to keep up with my favorite titles that I do in fact purchase.

 

As a previous poster indicated, I would also be in favor of an electronic subscription with the publisher, although this torrent download stuff would have to be figured out. It is this industry's "Napster" of the music world.

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For the un-initiated; re-produced without permission from:

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=19081

 

THE FOUR BUCKS STOPS HERE

So. To $3.99 or not to $3.99? That is the question that Marvel, DC, Dark Horse and Image are facing. A number already have certain monthly comics at that price level... but will their whole line join them soon?

 

Marvel are to set the price of a small handful of top-selling regular monthly books, including "New Avengers" and "Dark Avengers" (but not "Mighty Avengers") at $3.99. The intent is that the price rise here will keep other ongoing titles in the Marvel Universe at $2.99, which should come as a welcome relief to many.

 

The $3.99 books will be defined as "event titles" to keep interest in them as high as possible. There will be considerable marketing push behind them, presumably on the basis that there were few price complaints and lots of sales for the likes of "Secret Invasion," "World War Hulk" and "Final Crisis."

 

There has been some commentary that Marvel's publishing is already in a good way, with a 40% profit margin on their titles already. However, as a publically traded body, their responsibility is to their shareholders. Which means maximising revenue - not without an eye on the long term, but certainly finding a balance. If enough people are willing to pay $3.99 for specific kinds of comics, then it's Marvel's duty as a company to charge that price.

 

And Top Cow's statement guaranteeing their books would stay at $2.99 in 2009 did read to a cynical comics commentator as myself as "Top Cow To Raise Price Of All Comics To $3.99 In 2010"...

 

"Watchmensch" will be $3.99. And it's black and white. It's disgusting, it really is.

 

Now comics are an in-elastic commodity - doubling the price doesn't mean you halve the sales. So many comic shops may find they bring in more money overall. This may however reduce the amount of customers shopping to some extent and further marginalise the comics consumer base. Some may jump to waiting for the trade. Others may drop buying comics completely.

 

At some point, we’re going to find out.

 

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Here's the post from the Walking Dead reader's column: (bolded comments are Kirkman's responses)

 

What are your thoughts, if any, on Marvel's pricing policy: $2.99 durect market, $3.99 newstand?

 

I think it's a necessity for the newstand market. If a newstand guy can make more profits off a pack of gum or a magazine then why would they carry comics? Comics are sold for more on the newstand to justify them occupying the shelf space. At least-that's what I've been told. Just be lucky you know they're cheaper in comic shops.

 

Do you think Marvel is testing the comic market to see if a price hike would hurt comic sales?

 

I have no idea...seems likely but I really don't know.

 

Is there a hike coming to your comics?

 

With the economy in the state it is--I'm thinking NO...but I will say this. When I started reading comics, or rather, when I started shopping at a comic store, BONE was $2.95...and Image titles were $2.50... and Marvel and DC books were $1.95 and maybe even $1.75 on some titles.

 

As $2.95 became the standard price for an independent comic--Marvel eventually went to $2.25...and then $2.50...and then $2.95...and then $2.99.

 

Independent comics have gone to $2.99...and some smaller publishers charge $3.99...which a lot of people say is too expensive. But you see, Marvel & DC have advertising and newstand and subscription revenue streams that aren't there for independent books...and they, on average, sell far more than an independent book...they should NEVER be at the same price.

 

Now Marvel is selling more and more standard length comics at $3.99...holy mess. What happened to $3.25...or $3.50...or $3.75? I mean...that's a HUGE jump. I hope it doesn't cripple the entire comics industry.

 

Meanwhile...all my titles will remain at a nice $2.99 for at least a little while longer.

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For the un-initiated; reproduced without permission from:

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=18832

 

ECONOMICALLY SPEAKING

Every day the news sounds worse: we’re in the worst economic freefall since the Great Depression, they say. Unemployment is rising. Costs are rising. Credit is unavailable. Dogs and Cats are living together.

 

Thing is, I still seem to be doing OK at Comix Experience – as I mentioned last month, our third quarter was up 15% from the previous year, and our October was up 8%. I’m knocking wood right now that this will continue on, but I don’t see any huge reason it shouldn’t be so.

 

At the end of the day people need to be entertained, and comics scratch a particular itch that isn’t scratched in other ways. Even better, comics have hit a cultural point where, if we’re not lovingly embraced, at very least we’re accepted among other mediums as valid and legitimate, which gives us a big leg up on previous economic crises.

 

Plus, y’know, the new President-Elect reads comic books, too, which can’t hurt either.

 

This doesn’t mean things are all bread and roses, of course – there will be blips and burps, and businesses (be they retailers or publishers or distributors) who are undercapitalized, or are bad planners, or are just not as good as they need to be to do their job, run the risk of going under. It is just that I don’t think that the larger economic picture in general has as great of an impact upon any specific market as some of the pundits believe.

 

What I do think is that fear can be self-perpetuating. As near as I can tell, most of my customers are not directly being impacted by the economic malaise – certainly not, at least in the Bay Area, as much as we were impacted by the dot-com bust, or the drop in tourism after 9/11 – but that the talk about the malaise has got people second guessing their choices.

 

Certainly, I think we’ve reached a fair amount of price resistance in the comics market. $3.99 cover prices are a large barrier to “Feeling Good” about the market. But the issue isn’t price specifically: it is absolutely clear to me that people will pay almost anything for something that they actually want. We’re selling “Watchmen” hand over fist, and there’s absolutely no barrier in people’s minds for paying $20 for that. Nor does the $4 cost of a “Secret Invasion” or “Final Crisis” seem to be a problem for the overwhelming majority of the readership. Because people want those things. As a “luxury” item, people will pay whatever they need to for that luxury, as long as they can see the value in that luxury. If there was a new, say, Alan Moore and George Perez comic tomorrow on a subject and character that people want you could charge ten dollars for it, and people would buy it without batting an eye. But asking $3.99 for something less popular, or by an unremarkable creative team is always going to be a hard sell in the best of times.

 

The point is that content is king, and that price for any individual item is a secondary consideration at best. Yes, absolutely, price in the aggregate can and will cause people to second guess their habits, but in the individual cases, the question is more that of value than of price.

 

In the comics market things are skewed in another way – in terms of the Marvel and DC “universes” we’re often not actually selling the individual pieces of the story. What we’re actually selling is the periodical thrill of participating in those universes.

 

I had an interesting conversation with a publisher the other day where he wondered out loud what would happen without the periodical in the superhero genre: could Marvel and DC switch to a GN-driven format for those characters?

 

I very much think that the answer to that is “No”. Oh, sure, you’ll always be able to sell an upscale format of an A-list creative team on A-list properties, but there are probably less than two dozen “A-list” creators, and far less than a dozen properties for whom that would be tenable. There would be a measurable market for an OGN of, say, Spider-Man. There is a much much smaller market for an OGN of Iron Man. And there’s effectively no audience for an OGN of, say, Ms. Marvel.

 

But people will (in many situations) buy a periodical comic featuring Ms. Marvel. Why? Because what is selling is not as much the individual character, but, rather, the connections to the larger “Marvel Universe.”

 

To put it another way, in a somewhat tortured analogy, the Soap Opera “Guiding Light” was been in near-continuous daily production since 1937. But I suspect that if you took the most popular character from that show and put them instead in a once-a-quarter two hour movie, not many people would watch. While Soap fans may tell you they’re watching for the “character” or the “story,” what I think they’re actually watching for is the serialization, and/or the continuity. It isn’t about the particular character, or about the story line – it is about the daily action and habit of following the serialization.

 

Marvel and DC’s superhero universes are very much the same. I think a great deal of the appeal is in the macro of those universes as much as it is about the individual storylines. People like dense continuities where they can feel like an insider for keeping it all straight, for investing their time and their personalities within it. There’s a sort of genuine pleasure to be able to escape into an ongoing and neverending fictional world – and I really don’t think that pleasure can be matched if all the stories were to stand alone, as it would in an OGN world.

 

Or to put it another way: what DC is selling to you isn’t so much Batman or Superman or Wonder Woman – what they’re actually selling you is a place where Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman and a skillion other cool characters all exist and interact together. What the superhero reader is really buying is the macro of the “universe,” even if there are specific pieces and situations within it that appeal to you more than others.

 

Somewhat parenthetically, this is almost certainly why Marvel is kicking DC’s butt in market share right now – Marvel took over half of the market in September 2008 – Marvel’s “macro,” from Civil War to the “Who Do You Trust?” of Secret Invasion has been very relatable to the world outside our window; while DC’s macro is all cool high-concept spectacle (Seven different Lantern corps, Darkseid winning humanity’s free-will, 100k “supermen” on Earth, and so on), that isn’t as humanly translatable.

 

But we do have a huge economic iceberg coming on the horizon, and ironically a lot of it sort of stems from Marvel’s massive recent success.

 

As near as I can tell, the people in charge of Marvel, and I don’t mean on a publishing level, I mean their bosses, don’t especially care about comics or publishing. They’re looking to leverage the characters across as many platforms as they can, and comics are just one small piece. They’ve lucked into a situation where dynamic editorial strengths are pushing the quality of the individual books as best they can, but at the end of the day, I don’t have faith that the people making the ultimate decisions about money matters care whether the editor-in-chief is Joe Quesada making good comics, or me, making lousy comics, as long as more money is made this year than last year, as long as more money is made this quarter than last quarter.

 

I’m pretty confident that if you could show Marvel’s upperest management that stopping periodical publishing, and going all digital would instantly give them 5% more revenue with no downtime in the transitions between markets, they’d stop publishing periodical comics tomorrow, with no hesitation whatsoever, nor any concern for the current and existing market.

 

(Thankfully, the math on that looks to be pretty far away, so that isn’t a concern)

 

But at the end of the day, the people employed by that upperest management have a mandate to make more money this year than last year. If they can keep producing “good” comics to do so, more the better, but by hook or by crook they’ll either make more money, or be replaced by someone who will.

 

One way to do that is to increase the title count. They’ve certainly done that (and appear to be continuing to do so, fairly dramatically). Another way to do that is by increasing cover prices. And they are doing that as well – up to the point where this month’s “Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Boxes” #1 is $3.99 for just 16 pages of comics content.

 

Of course, you can also do it by breaking new markets, and Marvel is also aggressively trying to do that. Certainly, Marvel is publishing a wider range of material than they ever have before, and should be congratulated for that, but those efforts are more likely to pay long-term dividends then to help them significantly next quarter, and next quarter is where much of their focus appears to be.

 

One problem with increasing title count at the same time as you’re raising prices (the majority of Marvel’s new mini-series and special projects appear to be coming in at the $3.99 price point; usually for a standard 32-page package) is that you really run the risk of alienating your customer base while they’re being stretched too thin – in two directions at that. I’m seeing fewer and fewer sales on spin-off material, and I’m slashing my orders on stuff that doesn’t “matter,” that’s not strictly in-continuity or relevant to the current Marvel Universe. Because the customers can’t possibly keep up with all of it.

 

The question is, can the retailer tell the gold from the dross when they’re placing their orders? If they can’t, that’s a massive iceberg to deal with, especially with Marvel’s dominance of the market share being so wide – it simply isn’t healthy for one participant in a market to be so disproportionate a share of it, as they become “too big to fail”

 

We’ll have something to worry about if standard Spider-Man, Iron Man, Batman, Superman, etc go to $3.99 per issue for the 32 page package, but I just don’t see that happening in the next year (though a move to $3.50 could happen, perhaps), because my observations of consumer behavior is showing a stiff price resistance there for anything that isn’t exemplary. Presumably, this will begin to show strongly in the sales charts over the next 3-6 months.

 

The real risk for comics, as always, comes from greed and over-proliferation. These things are almost always self-correcting, however, given enough time (and bloodshed) – and I feel well positioned to weather that. Is your local retailer?

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The $3.99 books will be defined as "event titles" to keep interest in them as high as possible. There will be considerable marketing push behind them, presumably on the basis that there were few price complaints and lots of sales for the likes of "Secret Invasion," "World War Hulk" and "Final Crisis."

 

Of course there's no complaints.

 

Nobody is allowed to return books.

 

Who do you complain to when there is nobody to complain to?

 

Just cut back your preorders. Which leads to jacked prices...which leads to people dropping titles and shops cutting back on preorders...which leads to...oh...i'm dizzy...

 

On a more positive note, I means that, for Marvel anyway, I know to stay away from any book at 3.99 since I know it's going to be nothing but pap bridging summer events which will also be pap.

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The $3.99 books will be defined as "event titles" to keep interest in them as high as possible. There will be considerable marketing push behind them, presumably on the basis that there were few price complaints and lots of sales for the likes of "Secret Invasion," "World War Hulk" and "Final Crisis."

 

Of course there's no complaints.

 

Nobody is allowed to return books.

 

Who do you complain to when there is nobody to complain to?

 

Just cut back your preorders. Which leads to jacked prices...which leads to people dropping titles and shops cutting back on preorders...which leads to...oh...i'm dizzy...

 

On a more positive note, I means that, for Marvel anyway, I know to stay away from any book at 3.99 since I know it's going to be nothing but pap bridging summer events which will also be pap.

 

yup..

 

looks like i'll be only picking up Dark Tower from them now...no more Kick Azz (if it ever even has another issue), Hulk or Secret Invasion for me anymore...i actually feel liberated (:

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I think this is a good point:

 

Marvel and DC’s superhero universes are very much the same. I think a great deal of the appeal is in the macro of those universes as much as it is about the individual storylines. People like dense continuities where they can feel like an insider for keeping it all straight, for investing their time and their personalities within it. There’s a sort of genuine pleasure to be able to escape into an ongoing and neverending fictional world – and I really don’t think that pleasure can be matched if all the stories were to stand alone, as it would in an OGN world.

 

Or to put it another way: what DC is selling to you isn’t so much Batman or Superman or Wonder Woman – what they’re actually selling you is a place where Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman and a skillion other cool characters all exist and interact together. What the superhero reader is really buying is the macro of the “universe,” even if there are specific pieces and situations within it that appeal to you more than others.

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