Comics Cost Money! -part two-

So last time we got ourselves up to the point in time where the comic book market began its brief boom and prices started exploding upward. In case you're coming in cold or need a point of reference, here's the original chart that compares the cover price of a comic, by year, to it's adjusted value in 2006 dollars:



So what the heck happened around 1989-1990 that forced comic book prices up so high so quick, such that they're now more expensive than they've ever been with no evidence of relief in sight? Why is the cost now so much higher than anything that's been historically necessary? Has readership fallen so far that the margins have to be larger to support the industry? Are the margins actually larger at these price points, or is it just incredibly expensive to produce funnybooks now compared to every other time in their history? Let's first look at the most basic way that the market started to change: speculation.

If one million copies of Zippy-Doo #1 were sold at $1.50 an issue in 1992, do one million people own it? Not a chance. If one million copies of a 1940's Superman comic were sold, chances are that one million little Timmys bought them. Granted, comics speculation started in the '70s to a degree and continued through the 1980s, but prior to the massive boom that was kicked off by the Batman movie, there were not ridiculous amounts of multiple covers or hordes of people speculating en masse on any number of things (or just about everything, as was the case for a couple of years). The tough part about proving what was really going on is that the speculation and investment market makes sales and circulation numbers almost meaningless- if a significant portion of the buying audience is getting multiple copies of things, or if they're just along for the ride, we can't tell what the real size of a the core comic collecting audience was at the time. What we do know, though, is that by the end of the boom, that core audience was a fraction of what it once was. Did the smaller number of people buying comics drive the price up, or did the price increases drive people away?

Here's what I think happened; initial numbers looked good in the glut, but it was thanks to die hard fans that would stick around through most anything and/or speculators with disposable income buying up all the books, and multiple copies at that. Little Timmy, the bread and butter of the last several decades, was boxed out. If pressed to identify a specific breaking point, I'd say the magic number was the one dollar cover price. After this, a comic just wasn't something you could throw some change at. Anecdotally, this corresponds to the time when you could expect to see fewer and fewer comics outside of the rapidly expanding specialty market (which contracted just as rapidly when the glut ended), probably because the casual, impulse-buy demand just wasn't there anymore at the higher price point.

If we assume that decreased demand (lower print runs) pushes cover price upward (higher per-unit cost of production), a rather pesky vicious cycle comes into play. Little Timmy isn't buying all the comics anymore, so the books get geared towards older audiences. Lose more readers. Circulation drops; price ticks up again. Increase appeal with fancier paper and sophisticated printing/coloring - ironically, things that little Timmy wouldn't have cared about or likely even noticed 20 plus years ago - and it costs more to produce and drives the price up. Lose more readers. Circulation drops; price ticks up again. Rinse and repeat.

At this point, it seems that comics are relying on a very loyal core audience of older collectors with a fair bit of disposable income to keep things going. It will be interesting to see how long this can be expected to last given the rate at which prices are going up and readership isn't. The current sense of dissatisfaction with the last few years' product among the "core audience" of collectors is not a good sign. Say, that sounds like a segue if ever there was one...

I mentioned last time that I've abandoned Marvel altogether, and it's been that way for the last several years. Next time, we'll look at Ion- one of the many ways in which DC's been practically hand-delivering requests for me to do the same with them of late.