If you’ve collected super-hero comics for more than a few years, and especially if you frequent any of the comic book news websites or forums, you’ve heard something like this:
If Marvel and DC increase their price one more time, I’m out. I will not stand for this kind of gouging. Who do they think they are? They obviously have no respect for their long-time readers, and I will not pay their prices.
The complaints have been especially loud with the most recent price hike, from $2.99 to $3.99. (Marvel started this practice with Secret Invasion last year, and DC is just now beginning to role out the practice with some of their titles.) That’s a price jump of 33%, the largest percentile increase of cover prices since 1989, when prices for most comic books jumped another 33%, but then it was from $0.75 to $1.00.
But will comic book readers really drop their hobby over such a dramatic increase in prices?
If you are a number-crunching geek, you owe it to yourself to check out the sales charts at ICV2, and further analyzed by Heidi MacDonald and friends over at Publisher’s Weekly’s The Beat. Choose a title that existed in May 2001 (the first month available from ICV2’s charts) and in the most recent month available. For the titles that have survived that long without an editorially mandated break (like the break the Bat-titles took earlier this year), you’ll see that most of them have actually increased in sales between 2001 and now. For example, Amazing Spider-Man increased from 45,436 to 65,525 in sales, which is an increase of 40%. And Batman increased 142%, from 40,046 to 96,913.
However, the average price for a comic book from either of those two publishers increased from $1.99 to $3.99. That’s an increase of 100%. So the average price has doubled in the past ten years, but sales have actually increased for many titles.
There are, of course, other mitigating factors in deciding whether or not to make a purchase. Both Marvel & DC have increased the number of titles they publish dramatically, which may draw readers away from one title in favor of another. Creators on a title change. Titles may be forced to participate in a cross-over event that you’re not interested in.
But the modern super-hero comic book industry, more than maybe any other industry in the United States, is built upon the idea of completionism. That is, you can’t get just one issue of a title here and there anymore. You have to buy them all. I still I have the original issues of Marvel Super-Heroes Secret Wars and Crisis on Infinite Earths that I bought in the early 80s. And I know individuals who have been collecting far longer than that.
Comic books are luxury items. But in a very real sense, they can also be addictions. Readers become personally invested in their favorite characters, and the publishers realize this. Unlike other luxury items, the demand for a particular title is not especially fluid. And that is especially true for well-established characters like Batman and Spider-Man.
Like with any other product or service, there is an upper limit as to what people will pay for it. DC and Marvel are trying to find out what that number is. When sales start to decline, you’ll know they’ve hit it. But they haven’t hit it yet. But sales are still increasing for individual titles as well as total sales. So expect another smaller price increase by the end of 2010.
To see how invested people can become in their favorite characters, click here.
For another take on the recent price increases, click here.
To see how the Golden Age started, click here.
To listen to the most recent developments in the Liefeld/”Yellow Hat” controversy, click here.
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