I know when Season 2 of Walking Dead Started Wal-Mart had an endcap with Walking Dead trades on it. I never checked it though to see if they were edited in any way. I was hoping this move might get them carrying SOME other comics, but my local Wally World still doesn't carry any comics. :((
See when season 2 of TWD started I hear about various Walmarts getting in the trades. I looked in the book section of mine and the trades had been put in with the kids books. I saw a lady stocking shelves and asked her why they were in with the kids books. "Manager said any comics get racked the kids books." So I pointed out the mature reader's warning on the cover then opened it up to show her how these were not comics you would want a kid reading. She told me she had to do whatever the manager said. So after I got done shopping I tracked down the manager told him that TWD comic was not for kids. "Well that is absurd all comics are for kids." About 2 weeks later I was in the store and saw a mother complaining at the service desk that they had sold "Violent pornography to her 8 year old!"
at the risk of sounding like a prude i've often felt a little uncomfortable about The Boy's being on the shelf at Barnes and Noble without some sort of shrinkwrap over it. Any kid could crack that joker open to some pretty graphic stuff that i don't think is age appropriate. Hell, i'm not convinced that I'M old enough to read The Boys.
I know when Season 2 of Walking Dead Started Wal-Mart had an endcap with Walking Dead trades on it. I never checked it though to see if they were edited in any way. I was hoping this move might get them carrying SOME other comics, but my local Wally World still doesn't carry any comics. :((
See when season 2 of TWD started I hear about various Walmarts getting in the trades. I looked in the book section of mine and the trades had been put in with the kids books. I saw a lady stocking shelves and asked her why they were in with the kids books. "Manager said any comics get racked the kids books." So I pointed out the mature reader's warning on the cover then opened it up to show her how these were not comics you would want a kid reading. She told me she had to do whatever the manager said. So after I got done shopping I tracked down the manager told him that TWD comic was not for kids. "Well that is absurd all comics are for kids." About 2 weeks later I was in the store and saw a mother complaining at the service desk that they had sold "Violent pornography to her 8 year old!"
Stupidity on Wal-Mart's part.
Then again, I would probably monitor what my 8 year old was buying, but it's still Wal-Mart's fault.
I know when Season 2 of Walking Dead Started Wal-Mart had an endcap with Walking Dead trades on it. I never checked it though to see if they were edited in any way. I was hoping this move might get them carrying SOME other comics, but my local Wally World still doesn't carry any comics. :((
See when season 2 of TWD started I hear about various Walmarts getting in the trades. I looked in the book section of mine and the trades had been put in with the kids books. I saw a lady stocking shelves and asked her why they were in with the kids books. "Manager said any comics get racked the kids books." So I pointed out the mature reader's warning on the cover then opened it up to show her how these were not comics you would want a kid reading. She told me she had to do whatever the manager said. So after I got done shopping I tracked down the manager told him that TWD comic was not for kids. "Well that is absurd all comics are for kids." About 2 weeks later I was in the store and saw a mother complaining at the service desk that they had sold "Violent pornography to her 8 year old!"
Stupidity on Wal-Mart's part.
Then again, I would probably monitor what my 8 year old was buying, but it's still Wal-Mart's fault.
It is that Walmart's manager's fault. Since he took over the store 2 years ago it has went down hill. I have plenty of friends that work at various Walmarts on the coast,and they have told me it is company policy to have all the new dvds,video games and CDs on the shelves by 9am Tuesday. The one in my town you are lucky if they have them out by 10pm on Wednesday night. Also the pharmacy is horribly ran. I take Trazadone to fight my insomnia. 3 100 mg pills each night. Well at least 3 times now,I have called in my prescriptions. Came in the next day and been told they could only give me a partial fill on my sleep meds. Each time they gave me 9 pills total. So I asked when they would be getting more in. "About 2 weeks". I have tried complaining to the manager about this stuff but he doesn't seem to care. Mainly cause he knows that unless you want to drive at least 30 more minutes there is no place else in this area. I finally got tired of the manager's "I don't give a shit" attitude,and called the district manager. He informed me they keep getting plenty of people calling in and complaining about the local manager. But he is still there. I will be happy when I move in about a year.
No argument there. My main point though was that it's not impossible to make money off of literature, it just needs to be available. And comic books aren't. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, etc. are all a part of the popular collective consciousness every bit as much as Harry Potter is and I think that if their literary adventures were available as readily as Harry Potter is, that they would sell considerably more copies than a lot of people think they would. If a reasonably priced stack of Amazing Spider-Man books were available in the checkout line at Wal-Mart next to People magazine, it would sell in numbers that would cause the bean counters who are used to the current numbers faint, I have no doubt of that.
It becomes a sort of chicken and egg though, doesn't it? How long would comics need to have shelf space like People Magazine before the ubiquitous has any effect? And who is going to foot the bill during that time? Remember, part of why comics lost newsstand space is that they didn't make the retailers enough money relative to the more expensive magazines they could sell. I feel like we are hearing arguments that they need to be cheaper, and need to be displayed and carried by more people. Those are opposing forces. Sure, an airport newsstand might carry Harry Potter mass market trade paperbacks, but that is because for the space it takes to display them, you are looking at a potential ten dollar impulse buy. Keeping up on the latest issues of this or that comic can be a hard thing to compete with shelf space that you could otherwise sell gum or US Weekly with. Which have already proven to be more dependable.
Again, it is a bummer, but personally I don't believe that if you necessarily make it available they will come. Especially as comics actually are pretty available. I can't think of many places- maybe outside a tiny newsstand- that would have a Harry Potter book and not have at least a comic or two. Certainly all the bookstores and libraries have them.
Two points.
1. I did not say cheaper. I said reasonable. If you can make a comic book that is the price of the other magazines in the checkout aisle (and I honestly don't know what that is, but I'm sure it's more than $3.99, but pack it full of content, that's not cheaper, but it is reasonably priced. I actually saw something like that around the time of the Green Lantern movie and again around the time of the Captain America movie. I'd like to see that every month. Put all four Batman titles together in one book, charge a reasonable price for it and put it in the magazine aisle. It will cost more than $3.99 so retailers would be more likely to stock it. 2. "I can't think of many places- maybe outside a tiny newsstand- that would have a Harry Potter book and not have at least a comic or two." Seriously? I can think of a whole bunch. Starting with Wal-Mart (except for copies of Watchmen around the time of the Watchmen movie) and Target (once upon a time many years ago, they had some Marvel books, but nothing there in years) and pretty much every local grocery store. The only places I can think of to go to buy both Harry Potter books and comic books are Barnes and Noble, the library (which people don't really go to much anymore unfortunately), Amazon.com (where you don't really go to "browse" but just find what you're looking for and check out) and my local Wegman's has some copies of a random Showcase Presents: Superboy and the Legion of Super Heroes on the top shelf for who knows what reason (nothing against the Legion of course, it just seems like an odd choice to me for your one comic book)
And don't misunderstand. I realize that it's not as simple as my posts make it sound and that there's a lot of money involved in this. But I also don't think that you can get anywhere without spending the money to get there and without thinking outside the box, neither of which are things the comic book industry seems willing to do. You're right about the reasons why comic books moved to the direct market ghetto, but instead of staying there, they should be thinking of ways to escape.
Plus there's been grumblings about getting the Marvel DCU online for mobile devices...and if that happens katie bar the door. $60 a year for unlimited access to their back catalog? Can't be beat.
As soon as that happens, the iPad will win the cost/benefit analysis for me. Heck, the money I'd save in just a few months would pay for the iPad.
Why the hell are comics not in every Wal-Mart in the country?
They tried that in the early ’90s. It didn't work then at a time when comics were selling like crazy. It didn’t work five or six years ago when they made a push to sell single issues in Borders and Barnes & Noble, either, even with special fixtures to display them. The only reason Archie stayed prominently displayed in grocery stores for so long was because of the digest format, which allowed them to be more easily displayed and were more profitable per sale. Disney Adventures did really well with the format for a few years too. But even Disney failed eventually. It’s all about the revenue per square foot.
The didn't fail, they just discovered a way that didn't work at that time. I'm standing by my premise. People like comics. Comic need to get into the hands of more people. hiding them away in specialty shops is not a good business model. When i say comics should be in every wal-mart in the country in mean they should be ubiquitous, common as air, not something you have to work to find. I spend a year teaching school in the West african desert and do you know what i saw every day? A giant billboard for Coca Cola and in the market next to barefoot ladies frying dough balls in a tin pan on the side of the street. i could get a Coca Cola any time I wanted. do you get what i'm saying? Buying comics should be easier than it currently is. thats all.
You know, you've really got the wrong idea if you think comics are 'hiding away in the specialty shops'. The comic shops are what saved the comic books from extinction. The original outlets for comics, the Mom & Pop shops and the newsstands, were already vanishing as a source for comics throughout the 60's and it was only the rise of comic shops and direct distribution in the 70's that kept the comic book from becoming a thing of the past. And the reason the comic was losing its foothold in its original arena of newsstands and shops was because the profit the dealers got for each comic was so negligible that it wasn't worth their time or shelf space to continue selling them.
A big part of the reason why comics were considered a pointless enterprise by the dealers at that time was because, unlike magazines, comics didn't adjust their prices accordingly with the times. When comics began in the 30's, they were priced the same as any other magazine on the rack: a dime. Over the years, the magazines adjusted their price according to annual inflation, climbing to 35 cents. to 50 cents, until hitting the price point of about two bucks or so in the sixties, whereas comics tried to maintain the ten cent price line by reducing the number of pages from 64 to 32, before making tepid steps upwards to 12 cents in the early 60's and then to 15 cents by the end of the decade. And that was still too little, too late.
Realistically, for a comic book to compete in the magazine racks of bookstores like Barnes & Noble -- and there's no real reason to expect that bookstores have all that solid a grip on survival either in the day of the e-reader -- the comic has to return to 64 pages and raise it's price to about ten bucks, or whatever it is that a contemporary magazine costs on the rack. Then the stands and the shops will make space for it.
Otherwise, the shops are the only things keeping comics from extinction. (Well, except maybe for the digital comic...)
I would like to point out for the record that I made my post before reading this one. ;)
No argument there. My main point though was that it's not impossible to make money off of literature, it just needs to be available. And comic books aren't. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, etc. are all a part of the popular collective consciousness every bit as much as Harry Potter is and I think that if their literary adventures were available as readily as Harry Potter is, that they would sell considerably more copies than a lot of people think they would. If a reasonably priced stack of Amazing Spider-Man books were available in the checkout line at Wal-Mart next to People magazine, it would sell in numbers that would cause the bean counters who are used to the current numbers faint, I have no doubt of that.
It becomes a sort of chicken and egg though, doesn't it? How long would comics need to have shelf space like People Magazine before the ubiquitous has any effect? And who is going to foot the bill during that time? Remember, part of why comics lost newsstand space is that they didn't make the retailers enough money relative to the more expensive magazines they could sell. I feel like we are hearing arguments that they need to be cheaper, and need to be displayed and carried by more people. Those are opposing forces. Sure, an airport newsstand might carry Harry Potter mass market trade paperbacks, but that is because for the space it takes to display them, you are looking at a potential ten dollar impulse buy. Keeping up on the latest issues of this or that comic can be a hard thing to compete with shelf space that you could otherwise sell gum or US Weekly with. Which have already proven to be more dependable.
Again, it is a bummer, but personally I don't believe that if you necessarily make it available they will come. Especially as comics actually are pretty available. I can't think of many places- maybe outside a tiny newsstand- that would have a Harry Potter book and not have at least a comic or two. Certainly all the bookstores and libraries have them.
Two points.
1. I did not say cheaper. I said reasonable. If you can make a comic book that is the price of the other magazines in the checkout aisle (and I honestly don't know what that is, but I'm sure it's more than $3.99, but pack it full of content, that's not cheaper, but it is reasonably priced. I actually saw something like that around the time of the Green Lantern movie and again around the time of the Captain America movie. I'd like to see that every month. Put all four Batman titles together in one book, charge a reasonable price for it and put it in the magazine aisle. It will cost more than $3.99 so retailers would be more likely to stock it. 2. "I can't think of many places- maybe outside a tiny newsstand- that would have a Harry Potter book and not have at least a comic or two." Seriously? I can think of a whole bunch. Starting with Wal-Mart (except for copies of Watchmen around the time of the Watchmen movie) and Target (once upon a time many years ago, they had some Marvel books, but nothing there in years) and pretty much every local grocery store. The only places I can think of to go to buy both Harry Potter books and comic books are Barnes and Noble, the library (which people don't really go to much anymore unfortunately), Amazon.com (where you don't really go to "browse" but just find what you're looking for and check out) and my local Wegman's has some copies of a random Showcase Presents: Superboy and the Legion of Super Heroes on the top shelf for who knows what reason (nothing against the Legion of course, it just seems like an odd choice to me for your one comic book)
And don't misunderstand. I realize that it's not as simple as my posts make it sound and that there's a lot of money involved in this. But I also don't think that you can get anywhere without spending the money to get there and without thinking outside the box, neither of which are things the comic book industry seems willing to do. You're right about the reasons why comic books moved to the direct market ghetto, but instead of staying there, they should be thinking of ways to escape.
I hear that. But here's the thing-- they HAVE put effort and dollars into an out of the box, out of the direct market place to sell their wares: digital. As with links I shared earlier in the conversation, from what data we can see, comics via Comixology seem to be selling gangbusters. And while we may not know the financial breakdown of the publishers' deal with Comixology, I would expect that the terms are at least as good, if not better than whatever number the infamously hard bargaining Walmart would squeeze them down to to carry their singles. And, unlike the newsstand and grocery store newsstand, comics sold via Comixology aren't returnable.
The future of getting comics into more hands has little to do with where print copies can be found. I think we are watching that paradigm shift.
And as for whether or not the price of a comic is reasonable. Well, it could be argued that if there is a market for a $3.99 single comic-- and from what we have seen, there is, and let's not forget, as much as people like to bemoan the sales numbers, compared to the long past, or compared to some spike years, I believe they are still well above the numbers in the late 90s. So by that measure, even if a $3.99 price might feel unreasonable to many of us, or even irrational, it seems that it is a rational price considering that sales did not drop off a cliff once that price came. Many people argue that the idea price to set for your good or service is just under what the market will bear. The market seems to bear $3.99 quite well. And I don't say that because I love that price-- heck, it is not like I'm profiting from it-- but I'm just saying that if enough consumers find that price reasonable, then it could be argued it is already a reasonable price.
Remember- based on sheer volume of content, even back in the days of $2.00 comics they were an expensive thing to read per page. Especially when compared to the thickness of a prose book or a magazine. It is not like the $2.99 or $3.99 price suddenly made it unreasonable when it was reasonable before, you know what I mean?
And as for making the package bigger to better earn shelf space and seem a better value in the bookstore. Well, of course. And they've done that already. That is the trade paperback market. A consumer who may find a three or four dollar single unreasonable may find a 10 or 20 dollar book reasonable. So they've got that covered. I know you are saying a little bit bigger for a little bit more money. But I think then you just end up creating a neither fish nor foul product that is not a single or a trade. And in a market that has places to put singles, and places to sell trades, would it really be worth the effort to try to fight for space for a new category of product when you've already got some people paying the current price for singles (be it print or digital) and collections (again be it print or digital)?
All fair enough points. However, it has been stated in this thread that Archie has been and continues to be successful doing something similar to what I suggested, albeit at a smaller size.
All fair enough points. However, it has been stated in this thread that Archie has been and continues to be successful doing something similar to what I suggested, albeit at a smaller size.
I think it is an interesting idea and, sure, Archie is successful given that it is still in business. But for the Big 2 to do the format that Archie does, then the Archie format is so successful that it is worth doing. And I think that Archie gets talked about that way- but I wonder just how big their numbers are.
Are sales of the (remember- returnable) Archie digests a bigger overall success than what the Big Two are doing? Because I don't know that is the case. Especially when we remember that the Big Two are not in the selling paper business, they are in the character business. And that business is doing very well for them. I know I saw all sorts of stuff with Big Two characters on it today. But I would probably have needed to go to a grocery checkout line to know that Archie exists.
But that is a digression. If the question is whether or not the Big 2- just talking the publishing division- should try to do what Archie does, and Archie often gets cited in these discussions, makes me wonder whether what Archie does is really all that more successful.
I don't know the real answer to that. Out of curiosity, though, I did a quick Google for Archie Comics Circulation and got this as a top result. This is a VERY cursory look at the question, to be fair. And the circulation numbers of their small line of comics and digests are impressive.
But despite what the author of that article suggests, they are not three times the sales of the top selling Big Two comics. And I don't know whether the circulation numbers count returns. And, again, it is a small line of books, with the Archie brands clearly not being able to sustain as many titles as the popular Marvel and DC properties. Sure, it is argued that a lot of people may read "an Archie" in a month. But how many read a bunch of Archies? How many read several a week? And then also get larger Archie trades, and a few nice hardcover Archie collections a year on top of that? It just seems to me that Archie, despite it's accessibility, has continued to be a smaller, more specialized business than what the Big Two are doing.
So, while I agree that Archie has been successful at surviving and being Archie, and having that niche, and that is not nothing, I don't know that the Archie format and model is SO successful that the Big 2 would be wise to undercut what is working pretty well for them right now in the interest of trying to sell their content for cheaper.
And even if they made an Archie-like digest of a months worth of Batman or Spider-Man comics, who is to say they would even be able to get the sort of placement that Archie is getting? Why spend money trying to fight Archie at being Archie, when your print divisions are already profitable as they are?
For what it's worth, I noticed that Dark Horse is selling digital copies of Mind MGMT (awesome book, btw) for $2 under cover price after the book is a month old. Get it day and date and it's $3.99. Wait a month and only pay $1.99. Now that's a deal.
I didn't check if they are doing that with other titles, but if so, and you read Dark Horse, please support them.
I have two possible answers for why they are doing this:
1) They are an underdog when compared to Marvel and DC, so they have to undercut in order to stay competitive.
2) They have their own app. They don't use Comixology. No middle man to share the money with. So they can discount the extra dollar and probably still take home about the same amount of profit. Win! I've been arguing this since the very beginning. The fact that the big two use Comixology pisses me off to no end. They can easily afford to hire a few programmers to build an app, and then take a larger cut as well as share some of the savings with the end user. Don't be beholden to another distributor. Doesn't make sense.
2) They have their own app. They don't use Comixology. No middle man to share the money with. So they can discount the extra dollar and probably still take home about the same amount of profit. Win! I've been arguing this since the very beginning. The fact that the big two use Comixology pisses me off to no end. They can easily afford to hire a few programmers to build an app, and then take a larger cut as well as share some of the savings with the end user. Don't be beholden to another distributor. Doesn't make sense.
It seems as if, after years of dealing with Diamond, they have come to prefer the single-distributor model. Quite probably because it allows them to price fix so effectively.
It seems as if, after years of dealing with Diamond, they have come to prefer the single-distributor model. Quite probably because it allows them to price fix so effectively.
No doubt. But I'm suggesting a no-distributor model. One that leaves the publisher completely in control of their product. They would make all the rules and all the profit. I can't imagine why they wouldn't want this.
It seems as if, after years of dealing with Diamond, they have come to prefer the single-distributor model. Quite probably because it allows them to price fix so effectively.
No doubt. But I'm suggesting a no-distributor model. One that leaves the publisher completely in control of their product. They would make all the rules and all the profit. I can't imagine why they wouldn't want this.
B
The same reason they like the Diamond arrangement.
It seems as if, after years of dealing with Diamond, they have come to prefer the single-distributor model. Quite probably because it allows them to price fix so effectively.
No doubt. But I'm suggesting a no-distributor model. One that leaves the publisher completely in control of their product. They would make all the rules and all the profit. I can't imagine why they wouldn't want this.
B
The same reason they like the Diamond arrangement.
They only have to deal with a single customer.
It gives them a bleat filter.
And it also allows them to potentially benefit from the eyeballs the other guy might be bringing to the Comixology app on a given week. Instead of having to spend money advertising their own app (though they do that, too) to try to attract customers to go down a silo that has only their product, they can also share a marketplace where even a customer showing up for the other guys' event or relaunch will see banners for your product, too. And they are only a click away from it. Comixology basically becomes the new local shop, where you can crowd the shelves and benefit from impulse and proximity just like a real shop.
Any maybe that is worth the money that you give away to the middleman? I don't know. But it is not like there is no value in a shared marketplace.
How is that getting your moneys worth? Its not the same medium, but you can spend $5, just a little more, and get several hundred pages worth of content in a book. Or, like I wrote above for the similar medium of magazines you can get very cheap subscriptions. And not only that, but when I subscribe to Motor Trend or ESPN for $20 for two years I also get the digital versian of the magazine plus extra content for FREE.
Okay, I feel like I'm getting my money's worth.
It's not a book; it's more akin to a magazine, and it's cheaper than most magazines, and with a whole lot less ad content. I'm not much attracted to taditional mail subscriptions because that leaves the packaging prey to the mercies of the mail handler, and I've yet to receive a magazine or catalog that doesn't get manhandled and mangled in some unfortunate manner, so I don't feel like I'd be getting any benefit out of getting a cheap subscription to anything unless it were shipped inside a steel box.
The average comic at DC is $2.99 for 32 pages. That's 9.3 cents a page. The 40 page comic is $3.99; I'm paying an extra dollar for those 8 pages. (Ideally, I should only have to pay 75 cents, but what are you going to do?) Basically, I don't care. What matters is that there is more material and that there is an extra story. I don't even care if it's a story that I don't like; it's still an extra story. (Usually, I do like the extra story.) Therefore, I personally feel it's worth the extra buck and I want that extra story. I'd rather pay $3.99 for a 40 page comic than for a 32 page comic. (I'd feel a lot better, though, if I were paying $3.99 for a 48 page comic...)
I'm not attacking you or anything, I just feel very passionately about this topic. It is more akin to a magazine, which is why I compared it to that above. But its not cheaper than most magazines. It's not even close. A subscription to your favorite magazine could easily work out to be 75 cents or less per issue. Thats my whole point. You can get several years worth of your favorite magazine for $40 or less. And yes, they do have more ads. Sure, but they also have much, much, much more content. You can finish a comic in 10 minutes. Reading a magazine cover to cover takes one hour plus.
I get it if you want it to be in absolutely pristine condition that you want to buy it off the shelf. Fine. You can still do that just like you can buy magazines off the rack. But I've gotten plenty of magazines through the mail and they turn out just fine for my purposes.
And also, like I said, magazines offer subscriptions for super cheap compared to the cover price and give you the digital copy with extra content for FREE.
To echo what Torch was saying earlier, the unfortunate reality is that comics, as a readership, is not as attractive of a demographic to advertisers, as well as to the people that magazines and their affiliated subscription services resell our eyeballs to. Wired, Motor Trend, and ESPN can afford to make less on the cover price because they are reaching a harder to reach, more valuable demographic.
At the end of the day, as comics readers, what we like is a pretty rarefied thing. A sub-culture within a sub-culture. Our eyeballs are simply not as desired, so we end up having to pay more for our content. At the end of the day, a lot more people- and especially those in a more desired demographic- would rather read about cars, sports, and gadgets then read the continuing adventures of Superman and Batman (or, any fiction, for that matter). So, when you want something more rarefied, you end up having to pay more.
I don't think it's necessarily a matter of us being a "less desirable" demographic.. we are just a narrower demographic, which is actually what marketeers are looking for. They WANT to have a focused, narrow group to advertise very specific goods to. The hard truth is that, as sales dwindle, and less people read the comics, the prospects of advertising in the comics becomes less advantageous. The publisher is forced to charge less for the ads, which offsets less of the cover price, which drives up the price, which alienates more readers, which begets less sales - a vicious cycle.
Ironically, I feel they are missing the golden opportunity here... charge a pittance for the digital content, since you are eliminating the overhead of printing and shipping and returning. Then you will have MORE sales, which means MORE profits, in spite of the lower price point. It's the ITUNES model, but the publishers are just as frightened by it as the record publishers. It took a 3rd party, Apple, to drag them into it kicking and screaming, only for them to enjoy billions in yearly sales because of it.
How is that getting your moneys worth? Its not the same medium, but you can spend $5, just a little more, and get several hundred pages worth of content in a book. Or, like I wrote above for the similar medium of magazines you can get very cheap subscriptions. And not only that, but when I subscribe to Motor Trend or ESPN for $20 for two years I also get the digital versian of the magazine plus extra content for FREE.
Okay, I feel like I'm getting my money's worth.
It's not a book; it's more akin to a magazine, and it's cheaper than most magazines, and with a whole lot less ad content. I'm not much attracted to taditional mail subscriptions because that leaves the packaging prey to the mercies of the mail handler, and I've yet to receive a magazine or catalog that doesn't get manhandled and mangled in some unfortunate manner, so I don't feel like I'd be getting any benefit out of getting a cheap subscription to anything unless it were shipped inside a steel box.
The average comic at DC is $2.99 for 32 pages. That's 9.3 cents a page. The 40 page comic is $3.99; I'm paying an extra dollar for those 8 pages. (Ideally, I should only have to pay 75 cents, but what are you going to do?) Basically, I don't care. What matters is that there is more material and that there is an extra story. I don't even care if it's a story that I don't like; it's still an extra story. (Usually, I do like the extra story.) Therefore, I personally feel it's worth the extra buck and I want that extra story. I'd rather pay $3.99 for a 40 page comic than for a 32 page comic. (I'd feel a lot better, though, if I were paying $3.99 for a 48 page comic...)
I'm not attacking you or anything, I just feel very passionately about this topic. It is more akin to a magazine, which is why I compared it to that above. But its not cheaper than most magazines. It's not even close. A subscription to your favorite magazine could easily work out to be 75 cents or less per issue. Thats my whole point. You can get several years worth of your favorite magazine for $40 or less. And yes, they do have more ads. Sure, but they also have much, much, much more content. You can finish a comic in 10 minutes. Reading a magazine cover to cover takes one hour plus.
I get it if you want it to be in absolutely pristine condition that you want to buy it off the shelf. Fine. You can still do that just like you can buy magazines off the rack. But I've gotten plenty of magazines through the mail and they turn out just fine for my purposes.
And also, like I said, magazines offer subscriptions for super cheap compared to the cover price and give you the digital copy with extra content for FREE.
To echo what Torch was saying earlier, the unfortunate reality is that comics, as a readership, is not as attractive of a demographic to advertisers, as well as to the people that magazines and their affiliated subscription services resell our eyeballs to. Wired, Motor Trend, and ESPN can afford to make less on the cover price because they are reaching a harder to reach, more valuable demographic.
At the end of the day, as comics readers, what we like is a pretty rarefied thing. A sub-culture within a sub-culture. Our eyeballs are simply not as desired, so we end up having to pay more for our content. At the end of the day, a lot more people- and especially those in a more desired demographic- would rather read about cars, sports, and gadgets then read the continuing adventures of Superman and Batman (or, any fiction, for that matter). So, when you want something more rarefied, you end up having to pay more.
I don't think it's necessarily a matter of us being a "less desirable" demographic.. we are just a narrower demographic, which is actually what marketeers are looking for. They WANT to have a focused, narrow group to advertise very specific goods to. The hard truth is that, as sales dwindle, and less people read the comics, the prospects of advertising in the comics becomes less advantageous. The publisher is forced to charge less for the ads, which offsets less of the cover price, which drives up the price, which alienates more readers, which begets less sales - a vicious cycle.
Ironically, I feel they are missing the golden opportunity here... charge a pittance for the digital content, since you are eliminating the overhead of printing and shipping and returning. Then you will have MORE sales, which means MORE profits, in spite of the lower price point. It's the ITUNES model, but the publishers are just as frightened by it as the record publishers. It took a 3rd party, Apple, to drag them into it kicking and screaming, only for them to enjoy billions in yearly sales because of it.
Yea. I tried to make this argument. Others argued that the "publishing" isn't really that expensive.
So, while I agree that Archie has been successful at surviving and being Archie, and having that niche, and that is not nothing, I don't know that the Archie format and model is SO successful that the Big 2 would be wise to undercut what is working pretty well for them right now in the interest of trying to sell their content for cheaper.
It should be noted that Archie has recently gone to all-reprint material for their digests—reprint material that they do not pay royalties on.
2) They have their own app. They don't use Comixology. No middle man to share the money with. So they can discount the extra dollar and probably still take home about the same amount of profit. Win! I've been arguing this since the very beginning. The fact that the big two use Comixology pisses me off to no end. They can easily afford to hire a few programmers to build an app, and then take a larger cut as well as share some of the savings with the end user. Don't be beholden to another distributor. Doesn't make sense.
That's what I think, too, but when I brought the idea up with Darwyn Cooke, he laughed and said it was a terrible idea because, based on their track records, they’d just screw it up. And the more I think about that, the more I think he’s right.
I know when Season 2 of Walking Dead Started Wal-Mart had an endcap with Walking Dead trades on it. I never checked it though to see if they were edited in any way. I was hoping this move might get them carrying SOME other comics, but my local Wally World still doesn't carry any comics. :((
See when season 2 of TWD started I hear about various Walmarts getting in the trades. I looked in the book section of mine and the trades had been put in with the kids books. I saw a lady stocking shelves and asked her why they were in with the kids books. "Manager said any comics get racked the kids books." So I pointed out the mature reader's warning on the cover then opened it up to show her how these were not comics you would want a kid reading. She told me she had to do whatever the manager said. So after I got done shopping I tracked down the manager told him that TWD comic was not for kids. "Well that is absurd all comics are for kids." About 2 weeks later I was in the store and saw a mother complaining at the service desk that they had sold "Violent pornography to her 8 year old!"
Stupidity on Wal-Mart's part.
Then again, I would probably monitor what my 8 year old was buying, but it's still Wal-Mart's fault.
It is that Walmart's manager's fault. Since he took over the store 2 years ago it has went down hill. I have plenty of friends that work at various Walmarts on the coast,and they have told me it is company policy to have all the new dvds,video games and CDs on the shelves by 9am Tuesday. The one in my town you are lucky if they have them out by 10pm on Wednesday night. Also the pharmacy is horribly ran. I take Trazadone to fight my insomnia. 3 100 mg pills each night. Well at least 3 times now,I have called in my prescriptions. Came in the next day and been told they could only give me a partial fill on my sleep meds. Each time they gave me 9 pills total. So I asked when they would be getting more in. "About 2 weeks". I have tried complaining to the manager about this stuff but he doesn't seem to care. Mainly cause he knows that unless you want to drive at least 30 more minutes there is no place else in this area. I finally got tired of the manager's "I don't give a shit" attitude,and called the district manager. He informed me they keep getting plenty of people calling in and complaining about the local manager. But he is still there. I will be happy when I move in about a year.
Hey guys, glad I found this post, as I'm going through my own struggles.
It's very hard for me to justify anything over $1 an issue. I wanted to get more into New 52, but they never have 99 cent sales for it, and they don't do collections for a small discount.
So I've made the difficult decision to stop getting DC stuff until they can somehow offer us some sales, or at least digital collections at a small discount. I guess it's also easier to leave, seeing how the creators are starting to leave, apparantly based on how DC may be overdirecting. DC has always been my favorite universes, and this isn't an easy decision to make.
I think my buying will now be based on Comixology sales. There's currently and Invincible 3 Day sale I've been hoping for.
How is that getting your moneys worth? Its not the same medium, but you can spend $5, just a little more, and get several hundred pages worth of content in a book. Or, like I wrote above for the similar medium of magazines you can get very cheap subscriptions. And not only that, but when I subscribe to Motor Trend or ESPN for $20 for two years I also get the digital versian of the magazine plus extra content for FREE.
Okay, I feel like I'm getting my money's worth.
It's not a book; it's more akin to a magazine, and it's cheaper than most magazines, and with a whole lot less ad content. I'm not much attracted to taditional mail subscriptions because that leaves the packaging prey to the mercies of the mail handler, and I've yet to receive a magazine or catalog that doesn't get manhandled and mangled in some unfortunate manner, so I don't feel like I'd be getting any benefit out of getting a cheap subscription to anything unless it were shipped inside a steel box.
The average comic at DC is $2.99 for 32 pages. That's 9.3 cents a page. The 40 page comic is $3.99; I'm paying an extra dollar for those 8 pages. (Ideally, I should only have to pay 75 cents, but what are you going to do?) Basically, I don't care. What matters is that there is more material and that there is an extra story. I don't even care if it's a story that I don't like; it's still an extra story. (Usually, I do like the extra story.) Therefore, I personally feel it's worth the extra buck and I want that extra story. I'd rather pay $3.99 for a 40 page comic than for a 32 page comic. (I'd feel a lot better, though, if I were paying $3.99 for a 48 page comic...)
I'm not attacking you or anything, I just feel very passionately about this topic. It is more akin to a magazine, which is why I compared it to that above. But its not cheaper than most magazines. It's not even close. A subscription to your favorite magazine could easily work out to be 75 cents or less per issue. Thats my whole point. You can get several years worth of your favorite magazine for $40 or less. And yes, they do have more ads. Sure, but they also have much, much, much more content. You can finish a comic in 10 minutes. Reading a magazine cover to cover takes one hour plus.
I get it if you want it to be in absolutely pristine condition that you want to buy it off the shelf. Fine. You can still do that just like you can buy magazines off the rack. But I've gotten plenty of magazines through the mail and they turn out just fine for my purposes.
And also, like I said, magazines offer subscriptions for super cheap compared to the cover price and give you the digital copy with extra content for FREE.
To echo what Torch was saying earlier, the unfortunate reality is that comics, as a readership, is not as attractive of a demographic to advertisers, as well as to the people that magazines and their affiliated subscription services resell our eyeballs to. Wired, Motor Trend, and ESPN can afford to make less on the cover price because they are reaching a harder to reach, more valuable demographic.
At the end of the day, as comics readers, what we like is a pretty rarefied thing. A sub-culture within a sub-culture. Our eyeballs are simply not as desired, so we end up having to pay more for our content. At the end of the day, a lot more people- and especially those in a more desired demographic- would rather read about cars, sports, and gadgets then read the continuing adventures of Superman and Batman (or, any fiction, for that matter). So, when you want something more rarefied, you end up having to pay more.
I don't think it's necessarily a matter of us being a "less desirable" demographic.. we are just a narrower demographic, which is actually what marketeers are looking for. They WANT to have a focused, narrow group to advertise very specific goods to. The hard truth is that, as sales dwindle, and less people read the comics, the prospects of advertising in the comics becomes less advantageous. The publisher is forced to charge less for the ads, which offsets less of the cover price, which drives up the price, which alienates more readers, which begets less sales - a vicious cycle.
I get what you are saying. And I agree that we are a desirable demographic. But the rub of it, compared to people like sports fans, or Discovery or History Channel viewing males who otherwise don't read for pleasure (just to name a couple places that advertisers love), is that we tend to be a demographic that is easier to find. And that makes us less desirable. Or, at least, less of a hot commodity to sell to advertisers.
From what I have read, we comics readers (and readers in general) tend to be a pretty ravenously media consuming, serious about their entertainment sort of lot. Which means that our eyeballs can also be found online in certain places. At the movie theater. Watching the now many geeky TV shows targeted to us. Reading magazines like EW, etc. That doesn't mean that we don't buy cars, too, just like sports fans. But it does mean that comics are not the only place to advertise to us. And the people selling ad placement in comics- especially now in the world of increasingly narrowcasted television and digital/social media- don't have any exclusive access to the likes of us. And that might be why, for example, we see more and more house ads in Big Two books. That could be space harder to sell these days, and they figure they can at least try to use that space to sell us more of their comics.
It's very hard for me to justify anything over $1 an issue.
Wow! And it's been like, what? Twenty-five years since a comic cost a buck?
But I know what you mean. I find it hard to justify spending anything over a grand for a new car.
I do a lot of mass transit these days.
Your snarkiness is noted sir... ^:)^
I like the story someone brought up awhile back about how people won't pay $2-3 for a digital book or $5 for an app they might like because the cost is prohibitive. . .
It's very hard for me to justify anything over $1 an issue.
Wow! And it's been like, what? Twenty-five years since a comic cost a buck?
But I know what you mean. I find it hard to justify spending anything over a grand for a new car.
I do a lot of mass transit these days.
So I guess we can now villainize anyone hunting the 25 cent bins? Or getting $5 trades?
I've been posting here for years, never attacking anyone, having reasonable discussions. Surprised finding this attitude on the boards.
Did anyone attack Bryan in the original post for wanting 99 cent books, and thinking 2-3 dollars is a lot for a comic?
OK, I see the point. Inflation. Things get more expensive. Doesn't mean I can't hope for a more cost effective way to pursue the hobby I love.
Perhaps I came off wrong. I'm not expecting all comics to be $1 from day one, but I'd love more sales from DC, or the previously mentioned idea of a subscription service.
It's very hard for me to justify anything over $1 an issue.
Wow! And it's been like, what? Twenty-five years since a comic cost a buck?
But I know what you mean. I find it hard to justify spending anything over a grand for a new car.
I do a lot of mass transit these days.
Your snarkiness is noted sir... ^:)^
I like the story someone brought up awhile back about how people won't pay $2-3 for a digital book or $5 for an app they might like because the cost is prohibitive. . .
. . . for their $700 iPad.
I really wasn't trying to be snarky, though I couldn't help noting a little irony. And I wasn't kidding about either the car or the mass transit.
I guess I've just simply gotten used to the fact that prices go up and that they will continue to climb due to economic pressures we don't always understand. I only worry when they climb too fast, and when my wages can't keep up. But even so, in today's economics, a dollar a comic, though far preferable than four bucks, just isn't realistic; it probably wouldn't even pay for costs of production.
It's very hard for me to justify anything over $1 an issue.
Wow! And it's been like, what? Twenty-five years since a comic cost a buck?
But I know what you mean. I find it hard to justify spending anything over a grand for a new car.
I do a lot of mass transit these days.
Your snarkiness is noted sir... ^:)^
I like the story someone brought up awhile back about how people won't pay $2-3 for a digital book or $5 for an app they might like because the cost is prohibitive. . .
. . . for their $700 iPad.
I really wasn't trying to be snarky, though I couldn't help noting a little irony. And I wasn't kidding about either the car or the mass transit.
I guess I've just simply gotten used to the fact that prices go up and that they will continue to climb due to economic pressures we don't always understand. I only worry when they climb too fast, and when my wages can't keep up. But even so, in today's economics, a dollar a comic, though far preferable than four bucks, just isn't realistic; it probably wouldn't even pay for costs of production.
Understood. Maybe my desire for the books to be a $1 is the same as my desire for gas to be $2 a gallon. Unreasonable?
I guess I need I relinquish myself to Comixolgy's $1 sales, and hope DC does some for New 52.
How is that getting your moneys worth? Its not the same medium, but you can spend $5, just a little more, and get several hundred pages worth of content in a book. Or, like I wrote above for the similar medium of magazines you can get very cheap subscriptions. And not only that, but when I subscribe to Motor Trend or ESPN for $20 for two years I also get the digital versian of the magazine plus extra content for FREE.
Okay, I feel like I'm getting my money's worth.
It's not a book; it's more akin to a magazine, and it's cheaper than most magazines, and with a whole lot less ad content. I'm not much attracted to taditional mail subscriptions because that leaves the packaging prey to the mercies of the mail handler, and I've yet to receive a magazine or catalog that doesn't get manhandled and mangled in some unfortunate manner, so I don't feel like I'd be getting any benefit out of getting a cheap subscription to anything unless it were shipped inside a steel box.
The average comic at DC is $2.99 for 32 pages. That's 9.3 cents a page. The 40 page comic is $3.99; I'm paying an extra dollar for those 8 pages. (Ideally, I should only have to pay 75 cents, but what are you going to do?) Basically, I don't care. What matters is that there is more material and that there is an extra story. I don't even care if it's a story that I don't like; it's still an extra story. (Usually, I do like the extra story.) Therefore, I personally feel it's worth the extra buck and I want that extra story. I'd rather pay $3.99 for a 40 page comic than for a 32 page comic. (I'd feel a lot better, though, if I were paying $3.99 for a 48 page comic...)
I'm not attacking you or anything, I just feel very passionately about this topic. It is more akin to a magazine, which is why I compared it to that above. But its not cheaper than most magazines. It's not even close. A subscription to your favorite magazine could easily work out to be 75 cents or less per issue. Thats my whole point. You can get several years worth of your favorite magazine for $40 or less. And yes, they do have more ads. Sure, but they also have much, much, much more content. You can finish a comic in 10 minutes. Reading a magazine cover to cover takes one hour plus.
I get it if you want it to be in absolutely pristine condition that you want to buy it off the shelf. Fine. You can still do that just like you can buy magazines off the rack. But I've gotten plenty of magazines through the mail and they turn out just fine for my purposes.
And also, like I said, magazines offer subscriptions for super cheap compared to the cover price and give you the digital copy with extra content for FREE.
To echo what Torch was saying earlier, the unfortunate reality is that comics, as a readership, is not as attractive of a demographic to advertisers, as well as to the people that magazines and their affiliated subscription services resell our eyeballs to. Wired, Motor Trend, and ESPN can afford to make less on the cover price because they are reaching a harder to reach, more valuable demographic.
At the end of the day, as comics readers, what we like is a pretty rarefied thing. A sub-culture within a sub-culture. Our eyeballs are simply not as desired, so we end up having to pay more for our content. At the end of the day, a lot more people- and especially those in a more desired demographic- would rather read about cars, sports, and gadgets then read the continuing adventures of Superman and Batman (or, any fiction, for that matter). So, when you want something more rarefied, you end up having to pay more.
I don't think it's necessarily a matter of us being a "less desirable" demographic.. we are just a narrower demographic, which is actually what marketeers are looking for. They WANT to have a focused, narrow group to advertise very specific goods to. The hard truth is that, as sales dwindle, and less people read the comics, the prospects of advertising in the comics becomes less advantageous. The publisher is forced to charge less for the ads, which offsets less of the cover price, which drives up the price, which alienates more readers, which begets less sales - a vicious cycle.
I get what you are saying. And I agree that we are a desirable demographic. But the rub of it, compared to people like sports fans, or Discovery or History Channel viewing males who otherwise don't read for pleasure (just to name a couple places that advertisers love), is that we tend to be a demographic that is easier to find. And that makes us less desirable. Or, at least, less of a hot commodity to sell to advertisers.
From what I have read, we comics readers (and readers in general) tend to be a pretty ravenously media consuming, serious about their entertainment sort of lot. Which means that our eyeballs can also be found online in certain places. At the movie theater. Watching the now many geeky TV shows targeted to us. Reading magazines like EW, etc. That doesn't mean that we don't buy cars, too, just like sports fans. But it does mean that comics are not the only place to advertise to us. And the people selling ad placement in comics- especially now in the world of increasingly narrowcasted television and digital/social media- don't have any exclusive access to the likes of us. And that might be why, for example, we see more and more house ads in Big Two books. That could be space harder to sell these days, and they figure they can at least try to use that space to sell us more of their comics.
dude that really sounds like you are just defending the status quo. I've said it before and i'll say it again. Something has got to change. In order to buy comics in 2012 you have to
a) know that you like comics (not a lot of filks stumbling across comics in the grocery store while mom is shopping like when we were kids)
b) know where to find comics (actively seek out a specialty store or website) (what other product in the world actively and deliberately limits its exposure to potential buyers)
c) have the money to buy comics ($3.99 price point is not holding up to a cost/benefit anaylysis for say 15 minutes entertainment)
i think that for comics to survive in the 21st century they MUST get into more hands. people like comics, not just us geeks but people in general. Why do we make comics hard to find? Comic art and writing is arguably better that perhaps it has ever been. Unfortunatley most "civilians" concept of what a comic is is 40 years out of date. i hope that the digital options available on tablets like the i pad will increase comics exposuer in the general public and i respect the hell out of Mark Waid for putting his money where his mouth is (literally) to launch his Thrillbent project. Even without digital i think that putting comics by the impulse items next to the frakking tabloids would result in greater sales that those generated by the...what 1200? specialty shops across America. Why the hell are comics not in every Wal-Mart in the country?
This ^^^
I'm still confused as to why Wal-Mart or Targets weren't carrying Batman or Avengers trades for the movie kicks, or why there aren't Walking Dead trades available. It makes no sense in our minds, but it has to in someone's.
I try my best to refuse to buy a four dollar book, and even then, it's hard as it's the four dollar books that I wanna read. This is as bad as double shipping, from my end. Money, money, money. I work as a selector for the library and get to write off my comics, and I still hate that I spend 40 bucks on 12 books at my LCS, and barely get 2 hours out of them if I'm lucky.
4 dollars for 15 minutes or less of entertainment? Stupid.
I get chewed out a lot by friends or people I meet because I am straight trade buying what I can't "use" for work.
Comments
Then again, I would probably monitor what my 8 year old was buying, but it's still Wal-Mart's fault.
1. I did not say cheaper. I said reasonable. If you can make a comic book that is the price of the other magazines in the checkout aisle (and I honestly don't know what that is, but I'm sure it's more than $3.99, but pack it full of content, that's not cheaper, but it is reasonably priced. I actually saw something like that around the time of the Green Lantern movie and again around the time of the Captain America movie. I'd like to see that every month. Put all four Batman titles together in one book, charge a reasonable price for it and put it in the magazine aisle. It will cost more than $3.99 so retailers would be more likely to stock it.
2. "I can't think of many places- maybe outside a tiny newsstand- that would have a Harry Potter book and not have at least a comic or two." Seriously? I can think of a whole bunch. Starting with Wal-Mart (except for copies of Watchmen around the time of the Watchmen movie) and Target (once upon a time many years ago, they had some Marvel books, but nothing there in years) and pretty much every local grocery store. The only places I can think of to go to buy both Harry Potter books and comic books are Barnes and Noble, the library (which people don't really go to much anymore unfortunately), Amazon.com (where you don't really go to "browse" but just find what you're looking for and check out) and my local Wegman's has some copies of a random Showcase Presents: Superboy and the Legion of Super Heroes on the top shelf for who knows what reason (nothing against the Legion of course, it just seems like an odd choice to me for your one comic book)
And don't misunderstand. I realize that it's not as simple as my posts make it sound and that there's a lot of money involved in this. But I also don't think that you can get anywhere without spending the money to get there and without thinking outside the box, neither of which are things the comic book industry seems willing to do. You're right about the reasons why comic books moved to the direct market ghetto, but instead of staying there, they should be thinking of ways to escape.
Great minds think alike (and so do ours).
The future of getting comics into more hands has little to do with where print copies can be found. I think we are watching that paradigm shift.
And as for whether or not the price of a comic is reasonable. Well, it could be argued that if there is a market for a $3.99 single comic-- and from what we have seen, there is, and let's not forget, as much as people like to bemoan the sales numbers, compared to the long past, or compared to some spike years, I believe they are still well above the numbers in the late 90s. So by that measure, even if a $3.99 price might feel unreasonable to many of us, or even irrational, it seems that it is a rational price considering that sales did not drop off a cliff once that price came. Many people argue that the idea price to set for your good or service is just under what the market will bear. The market seems to bear $3.99 quite well. And I don't say that because I love that price-- heck, it is not like I'm profiting from it-- but I'm just saying that if enough consumers find that price reasonable, then it could be argued it is already a reasonable price.
Remember- based on sheer volume of content, even back in the days of $2.00 comics they were an expensive thing to read per page. Especially when compared to the thickness of a prose book or a magazine. It is not like the $2.99 or $3.99 price suddenly made it unreasonable when it was reasonable before, you know what I mean?
And as for making the package bigger to better earn shelf space and seem a better value in the bookstore. Well, of course. And they've done that already. That is the trade paperback market. A consumer who may find a three or four dollar single unreasonable may find a 10 or 20 dollar book reasonable. So they've got that covered. I know you are saying a little bit bigger for a little bit more money. But I think then you just end up creating a neither fish nor foul product that is not a single or a trade. And in a market that has places to put singles, and places to sell trades, would it really be worth the effort to try to fight for space for a new category of product when you've already got some people paying the current price for singles (be it print or digital) and collections (again be it print or digital)?
Are sales of the (remember- returnable) Archie digests a bigger overall success than what the Big Two are doing? Because I don't know that is the case. Especially when we remember that the Big Two are not in the selling paper business, they are in the character business. And that business is doing very well for them. I know I saw all sorts of stuff with Big Two characters on it today. But I would probably have needed to go to a grocery checkout line to know that Archie exists.
But that is a digression. If the question is whether or not the Big 2- just talking the publishing division- should try to do what Archie does, and Archie often gets cited in these discussions, makes me wonder whether what Archie does is really all that more successful.
I don't know the real answer to that. Out of curiosity, though, I did a quick Google for Archie Comics Circulation and got this as a top result. This is a VERY cursory look at the question, to be fair. And the circulation numbers of their small line of comics and digests are impressive.
But despite what the author of that article suggests, they are not three times the sales of the top selling Big Two comics. And I don't know whether the circulation numbers count returns. And, again, it is a small line of books, with the Archie brands clearly not being able to sustain as many titles as the popular Marvel and DC properties. Sure, it is argued that a lot of people may read "an Archie" in a month. But how many read a bunch of Archies? How many read several a week? And then also get larger Archie trades, and a few nice hardcover Archie collections a year on top of that? It just seems to me that Archie, despite it's accessibility, has continued to be a smaller, more specialized business than what the Big Two are doing.
So, while I agree that Archie has been successful at surviving and being Archie, and having that niche, and that is not nothing, I don't know that the Archie format and model is SO successful that the Big 2 would be wise to undercut what is working pretty well for them right now in the interest of trying to sell their content for cheaper.
And even if they made an Archie-like digest of a months worth of Batman or Spider-Man comics, who is to say they would even be able to get the sort of placement that Archie is getting? Why spend money trying to fight Archie at being Archie, when your print divisions are already profitable as they are?
I didn't check if they are doing that with other titles, but if so, and you read Dark Horse, please support them.
I have two possible answers for why they are doing this:
1) They are an underdog when compared to Marvel and DC, so they have to undercut in order to stay competitive.
2) They have their own app. They don't use Comixology. No middle man to share the money with. So they can discount the extra dollar and probably still take home about the same amount of profit. Win! I've been arguing this since the very beginning. The fact that the big two use Comixology pisses me off to no end. They can easily afford to hire a few programmers to build an app, and then take a larger cut as well as share some of the savings with the end user. Don't be beholden to another distributor. Doesn't make sense.
Bry
B
They only have to deal with a single customer.
It gives them a bleat filter.
Any maybe that is worth the money that you give away to the middleman? I don't know. But it is not like there is no value in a shared marketplace.
Ironically, I feel they are missing the golden opportunity here... charge a pittance for the digital content, since you are eliminating the overhead of printing and shipping and returning. Then you will have MORE sales, which means MORE profits, in spite of the lower price point. It's the ITUNES model, but the publishers are just as frightened by it as the record publishers. It took a 3rd party, Apple, to drag them into it kicking and screaming, only for them to enjoy billions in yearly sales because of it.
It's very hard for me to justify anything over $1 an issue. I wanted to get more into New 52, but they never have 99 cent sales for it, and they don't do collections for a small discount.
So I've made the difficult decision to stop getting DC stuff until they can somehow offer us some sales, or at least digital collections at a small discount. I guess it's also easier to leave, seeing how the creators are starting to leave, apparantly based on how DC may be overdirecting. DC has always been my favorite universes, and this isn't an easy decision to make.
I think my buying will now be based on Comixology sales. There's currently and Invincible 3 Day sale I've been hoping for.
But I know what you mean. I find it hard to justify spending anything over a grand for a new car.
I do a lot of mass transit these days.
From what I have read, we comics readers (and readers in general) tend to be a pretty ravenously media consuming, serious about their entertainment sort of lot. Which means that our eyeballs can also be found online in certain places. At the movie theater. Watching the now many geeky TV shows targeted to us. Reading magazines like EW, etc. That doesn't mean that we don't buy cars, too, just like sports fans. But it does mean that comics are not the only place to advertise to us. And the people selling ad placement in comics- especially now in the world of increasingly narrowcasted television and digital/social media- don't have any exclusive access to the likes of us. And that might be why, for example, we see more and more house ads in Big Two books. That could be space harder to sell these days, and they figure they can at least try to use that space to sell us more of their comics.
And I am NOT joking.
I like the story someone brought up awhile back about how people won't pay $2-3 for a digital book or $5 for an app they might like because the cost is prohibitive. . .
. . . for their $700 iPad.
I've been posting here for years, never attacking anyone, having reasonable discussions. Surprised finding this attitude on the boards.
Did anyone attack Bryan in the original post for wanting 99 cent books, and thinking 2-3 dollars is a lot for a comic?
OK, I see the point. Inflation. Things get more expensive. Doesn't mean I can't hope for a more cost effective way to pursue the hobby I love.
Perhaps I came off wrong. I'm not expecting all comics to be $1 from day one, but I'd love more sales from DC, or the previously mentioned idea of a subscription service.
I guess I've just simply gotten used to the fact that prices go up and that they will continue to climb due to economic pressures we don't always understand. I only worry when they climb too fast, and when my wages can't keep up. But even so, in today's economics, a dollar a comic, though far preferable than four bucks, just isn't realistic; it probably wouldn't even pay for costs of production.
I guess I need I relinquish myself to Comixolgy's $1 sales, and hope DC does some for New 52.
I'm still confused as to why Wal-Mart or Targets weren't carrying Batman or Avengers trades for the movie kicks, or why there aren't Walking Dead trades available. It makes no sense in our minds, but it has to in someone's.
I try my best to refuse to buy a four dollar book, and even then, it's hard as it's the four dollar books that I wanna read. This is as bad as double shipping, from my end. Money, money, money. I work as a selector for the library and get to write off my comics, and I still hate that I spend 40 bucks on 12 books at my LCS, and barely get 2 hours out of them if I'm lucky.
4 dollars for 15 minutes or less of entertainment? Stupid.
I get chewed out a lot by friends or people I meet because I am straight trade buying what I can't "use" for work.