I miss reading the newsgroups, I'm less in touch with what's going on in the world of comics, drwho, etc. I go yesterday to assemble my list of comics to buy this week and noticed that four comics that shouldn't be $2.99, namely Black Panther, Exiles, Thor and Iron Man, are $2.99. Come to find out, months ago Marvel announced that they were hiking the price on some "underperforming" books rather than cancelling them. Black Panther has been $2.50 from the get-go, but the others were at at $2.25, making the jump to $2.99 a 33% increase. There were nine other titles on the list, although they've since backpedalled on Thunderbolts. Meanwhile some Vertigo books have been gradually making the jump from $2.50 to $2.75. Just about every mini-series are special project to come along these days is at least $2.99, and double issues are routinely $3.50. You expect prices to creep up every few years as paper costs increase, etc., etc., but a 33% jump on a core title without any change in format or creators or whatever is just bad news. I would suspect on all but a couple of these that people would vote with their feet and just not buy them. If you're making $.74 more per book, but you sell 25% fewer copies, the end result is the same, and you've alienated 25% of an already dwindling readership. As has been pointed out in the newsgroups, where I went for more info after stumbling upon this bombshell, it can be argued that the reason some of these books are underperforming is that they aren't very good to begin with, and in the case of established characters such as Thor and Iron Man, they've simply become a commodity that a certain core group of people will buy regardless of the price just to be completists. I have a couple of hundred issues of Iron Man from the 60's through the 80's, plus every issue of the current series, but for three bucks a whack I'm more inclined to go to the next comic show and fill in some gaps in the old series rather than continue to shell out for the new stuff. Even moreso with Thor because I have very few pre-1976 issues and there are a lot bigger gaps to fill in. Daredevil relaunched at $2.99 a few years ago, which was a stiff pill to swallow, but it was Kevin Smith writing it, and then Bendis took over after that, so the stories have actually been worth the extra money. Captain America, on the other hand, has relaunched also at $2.99 (with the first issue at $3.50 if I remember right), but nobody that interesting is writing or drawing it, so I'm not buying it. A lot of the Vertigo miniseries I've been skipping over since they've been mostly self-indulgent crap and for $2.99 each I can live without it.



Part of my problem is that I'm an old fart and I started buying comics 27 years ago when they were 25 cents. You could buy everything Marvel produced, and they produced maybe 20 books a week in 1976 with all the reprint titles, and spend about $20 a month. To do that now would cost $120 a month (for maybe 50 books total) if all the comics were the same price, but since they're so many specials and miniseries and prestige format, its probably more like $160 or so, not including trade paperbacks, statues, etc. The completist in me would like to do that, but the economist in me says that's too much money for too little value. As I said, I'm better served spending most of that cash on old comics, which at least have a certain nostalgia factor and at best have one of the things missing from today's comics: the sense of a shared universe. I supposed a younger generation of readers don't see the problem with $3 comics, endless mini-series, reboots, retcons, etc. But its hard to imagine that generation is big enough to sustain comics as they exist today.