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Spoilers Star Trek: Picard General Discussion Thread

Huh? What parallel universe?



Spock? What are you watching?



What did I just read?
Here...this might help:
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I was looking at the prices for the Star Trek: Picard Countdown Comics. $4.99. Wow. When I first bought comics, they were 75 cents. And considering that three issues of story today would've been done in one issue in the mid-'80s, it's like spending $15 to get the same story you would've spent 75 cents on back then. So, in 35-ish years, the price has multiplied by 20 times.

EDIT: I hope the increased price is going towards better pay for the creative teams and not just better pay for the people who are pulling the strings.
 
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Didn't everything go up with inflation, including salaries?

They probably did, but I'm hoping it all increased proportionately. That's the main thing. Over time, we've gradually moved into a Second Gilded Age, so who really knows?

I'm still looking forward to the Countdown, though. I want to pick it up, along with the ones they're releasing focusing on the aftermath of Discovery's second season.
 
I agree with Garth's core sentiment. It's not just inflation, comics drove up their prices with higher paper quality, etc., increasingly playing to the niche collectors' market and turning away from casual newsstand buyers. I have a lot more disposable income now then I did as a kid literally scrounging my pennies to afford another comic book, but they just seemed to get silly expensive to me relative to their reading/owning value once they got over $2 an issue. I pretty much stopped actively collecting in '99, occasionally getting pulled back in for a bit on a particular series in the early 2000s.

ETA: A check with an online inflation calculator backs this up. Using my own first comic (posted above) as an example, if comics had only gone up because of inflation, all other factors being equal, then a comic that cost $0.25 in 1975 should cost around $1.19 today. Comics haven't been that cheap for about 25-30 years.
 
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What a cool picture of Spock! Is that a uniform from between WNMHGB and the rest of the show?
Probably one the the promo pictures they took before they started filming the series. There are some of Shatner and Whitney in modified WNMHGB style uniforms as well.
 
Probably one the the promo pictures they took before they started filming the series. There are some of Shatner and Whitney in modified WNMHGB style uniforms as well.
The one where they hold colored flashlights, and the ones where they hold a ship model.
 
I agree with Garth's core sentiment. It's not just inflation, comics drove up their prices with higher paper quality, etc., increasingly playing to the niche collectors' market and turning away from casual newsstand buyers. I have a lot more disposable income now then I did as a kid literally scrounging my pennies to afford another comic book, but they just seemed to get silly expensive to me relative to their reading/owning value once they got over $2 an issue. I pretty much stopped actively collecting in '99, occasionally getting pulled back in for a bit on a particular series in the early 2000s.

ETA: A check with an online inflation calculator backs this up. Using my own first comic (posted above) as an example, if comics had only gone up because of inflation, all other factors being equal, then a comic that cost $0.25 in 1975 should cost around $1.19 today. Comics haven't been that cheap for about 25-30 years.
A lot of things have changed in the industry since really the 1980's

1. As you mentioned the various changes to paper stock, had an immediate impact on the cost of books, it also gave rise to the real contribution of colorists (thus increasing printing costs and the cost of the talent coloring the books).

2. The move from comics being available on spinner racks in book stores, and grocery stores, to convince stores, helped take comics away from mass entertainment. Also increasing cost didn't help. Books that would sale 200,000 (which wasn't a big seller) would be lucky to sell 20,000 today. When you sell in bulk you can survive with a much smaller margin, that helped keep pricing down, as the market continued to shrink, books had to increase just to keep the same amount of revenue coming in to the companies.

3. The talent behind the books started to get paid quite a bit better (though in many cases its still pretty awful, but it is better). I can't speak for Marvel, but DC started paying out royalties starting in the early 80's with Marv Wolfman and George Perez's New Teen Titians, and it eventually went company wide (though that took time). DC started doing things for certain creators like health care, paying premiums to get an exclusive term, etc. All things that cost more money and would not have happened back before 1980. The only real exception to this is Marvel paying Stan Lee a yearly Salary to be a figure head for the company.
 
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