Doesn't help your local B&M much but find a local convention and buy the comics a month or two later for a buck or so is one way to go. These things hold no value these days.
Rising comic book prices, what to do?
- Thread starter sciquest2525
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darkwing_duck1
Vice Admiral
IF they have what you want...a lot of places have dumped their "backstock" except for the true "good stuff" (Gold and Silver age). Finding a back issue of anything newer than the early 90s can be a difficult proposition (unless you go on-line to one of the big warehouses).
And you'd still have a little left over for the gumball machine. Those days sure are gone.
As someone who is rapidly approaching the 20k mark in collected books the 3.99 price has been a horrible thing. I have rapidly cut back on the number of titles I get each month from around 50 to around 15. Dropped all the Spiderman books and many x-books as well. Nearly all independent books are gone from my pull list as well. That price point like $4.00 gas is the tipping point I believe. It looks like it will be trade city for me for the most part in the future. I really do like my monthly books however and there will always be some I will get. Just no where near as many.
I still continue to buy single issues, but I'm much pickier now than I used to be about what I get. Since I "subscribe" to several titles through my comic shop's service (where they pull books monthly for me) I get a slight discount, but even then if a title begins to go downhill, I'll drop it like a rock. I dropped "Batman & Robin" after about three issues because I thought it was rubbish. I recently dropped a few other titles too because frankly, I'm not going to pay $3.99 an issue just to hope a title will get better.
In other cases, I only get trades because I started reading certain series long after they started publication. For instance, I didn't start to read "Fables" until early last year, so I had a lot of catching up to do and finding individual issues just wasn't an option since most stores no longer stock a reliable run of continuous back issues.
In other cases, I only get trades because I started reading certain series long after they started publication. For instance, I didn't start to read "Fables" until early last year, so I had a lot of catching up to do and finding individual issues just wasn't an option since most stores no longer stock a reliable run of continuous back issues.
Companies should go back to using the standard paper used to make books back in the 80s. This glossy paper garbage is mostly responsible for the spike and has killed in the industry. prices going up 400% since 1990 is ludicrous. That's why I stopped collecting years ago.... and the fact they simply take up way too much room and moving becomes a nightmare. On the plus side, manga has become more popular in the aftermath of Marvel & DC shooting themselves in the foot.
The only reason why comics were cheap in the first place was because they were cheaply made items to begin with. Anyone remember the old newsprint and four-color coloring process? They look shitty compared to today's comics, but they were da bomb back in the day.
Years of improved (and more expensive) production values, plus higher quality materials, plus more and more people (and very few of them are actual creators) demanding higher pay for what they do, and that's why we got $3.99 as the new average price for most comics these days.
I do think we're going to see Marvel and DC eventually start to scale back on the number of titles they produce as more and more consumers scale back on the number of titles they buy. For example, the current three times a month schedule for Spidey isn't going to be forever, IMO, and the number of Batman- or XMen-spinoffs titles may drop.
I don't think we'll ever see monthly comic books go away, but the number of such books will diminish. I also think we'll definitely see the rise of more and more online-only titles in the future...
Years of improved (and more expensive) production values, plus higher quality materials, plus more and more people (and very few of them are actual creators) demanding higher pay for what they do, and that's why we got $3.99 as the new average price for most comics these days.
I do think we're going to see Marvel and DC eventually start to scale back on the number of titles they produce as more and more consumers scale back on the number of titles they buy. For example, the current three times a month schedule for Spidey isn't going to be forever, IMO, and the number of Batman- or XMen-spinoffs titles may drop.
I don't think we'll ever see monthly comic books go away, but the number of such books will diminish. I also think we'll definitely see the rise of more and more online-only titles in the future...
Nardpuncher
Rear Admiral
I love the Dark Horse Savage Sword of Conan reprints....they're cheap ( about $20.00US) and there are 12 big issues in there. It takes days to read them all. A normal comci now is done in 8 minutes..if that!
The other thing they need to do in addition to using cheaper paper is to SHRINK THE PAGE SIZE! They've done it before, Silver Age comics are much larger aren't they? Dark Horse releases these Omnibus trades that shrink the page size but the image looks perfectly fine. How much cheaper would the cost be if you went back to newsprint paper and made it an inch shorter?
You could always go black and white for the monthlies and colour for the trades. That way the monthly books are cheap and the trades are further incentivized.
lets look at this economicaly, your average manga holds roughly 10-12 "monthlies" worth of material at an average price of $9 an issue that averages to less than 1/4th of the cost for a monthly, and your local big trade paperback runs $14-20 for 8-10 "monthlies" why? first a manga is much smaller page wise, and are not colored, and NOBODY IS COMPLAINING! Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, ect. get on the bandwagon
A similar problem:
I read both monthlies and trades, mostly trades. Trades are great. But they sometimes become messy when they are associated with cross-overs. Vital issues - and accordingly information - from other titles are sometimes not included leaving the story feeling disjointed and abrupt. When I buy monthlies, I find it easier to fill the gaps and keep up. Identity Crisis, as I recall, was the only trade I can think of that tried to tackle this by including several pages of typewritten text explaining what was going on in a crucial issue of one of the Superman titles. But many don't ...
... except when they do. In those cases you can get wildly varying art, story tone and fragmented/unresolved subplots caused from different titles residing under one book cover; Detective Comics, Batgirl and Nightwing lumped together, for example.
And, lastly, when cross-overs are spread across several trades, I often don't even know where to begin, so I don't - Marvel's Civil War being an example.
The thing is, all the small publishers have been doing this ages ago. Oni Press will once in a while do a hard cover (or in the case of Scott Pilgrim, foil cover), but they've basically taken the manga format and ran with it. In fact, for someone uneducated, they might even mistake some of these titles for manga.
Of course, they still do monthly floppies, but I have to imagine that most of the money that they get comes in from trade sales.
S
Stone_Cold_Sisko
Guest
What to do?
Go read a book.
or get a Netflix subscription.
or play WoW (or the upcoming DC Universe online, whatever)
and so on.
Go read a book.
or get a Netflix subscription.
or play WoW (or the upcoming DC Universe online, whatever)
and so on.
but i'm talking about the big publishers, they are clinging on to a failing format
darkwing_duck1
Vice Admiral
There's nothing wrong with the format, just the decisions behind the way it's published. As others have said, drop the paper quality some, stop with the fancy cardstock covers, etc and bring the page count back up to where it used to be.
Also, get some WRITERS in there who know how to handle more than one plot at a time and stop this "pacing for Trade" BS...
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