Comic Book Resources

Compare this with their Showcase Presents editions. Sure, they’re cheaper, but in the May solicitations, they’re only printing one instead of the two they’ve released every month since the line began.

Maybe this’ll get people to stop paying such ridiculous prices.

For $40, does Gardner Fox come back from the dead and read the Flash stories to me?

Good thing I bought the singles of Gaiman’s Batman two-parter.
Saved bunches of $$$.$$

Is there any entertainment media with a lower value than comics?

Speaking of overpriced deals, did you see the TPB for X-Men 2099 in the new Marvel solicits? 9 issues in a softcover for $30. Not quite as bad as the ones you’ve named, but awfully pricey for what it is.

Well fuck, man.

I won’t pay it.

Wow, and I’m still considering not picking up the second half of the Gaiman bat-story because it’s 4 bucks.

While I do think that these prices are absurd, it should be noted that the Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman books are both “deluxe editions” and will be oversized (much like the Batman R.I.P. and Volume 1 of Morrison’s JLA).

What’s the extra Alan Moore Superman story in the hardcover?

I had this moment of laughing at prices the other week when the Secret Invasion trade came out.
Marvel might have gotten a morbid curiosity buy out of me, but then I saw that they had upped the price on the trade, just like they did with the singles.
I picked it up, flicked through it dismissively, and with a chuckle and a ‘You dumb bastards’, I put it back down.
I swear to god, that company just has no interest in getting my money.

Is anyone out there stupid — or, maybe, carelessly wealthy — enough to pay these prices, anyway?

I mean, at Amazon that Gaiman BATMAN collection is $16.99, & of course anyone with a lick of sense will order it with something else to qualify for the $25 free shipping threshold. And if I were to buy it (which I won’t … I guess I like to think I outgrew Batman way back before puberty was really on my horizon), I’m sure I’d pay less than that by ordering it from Books-a-Million & adding their customer-loyalty discount plus their easily found $10-off-any-$50 order coupons, which would leave me paying around … let’s see … maybe $15, tops.

Of course, YMMV, as they say.

(And yeah, it’d be great to buy TPBs from one’s LCS. It’d also be great to have money grow on trees.)

In fairness to the individual Gaiman bat-issues, they are extra-sized to justify the price point. At least its not $4 for a normal, 22-page story, like Marvel is starting to do on some of their more popular books.

And yes, some of these trade and hardcover prices are ridiculous, and probably hurt the direct market more than anything. I know pricey trades occasionally drive me away from my LCS and into the arms of Amazon, depending on the the level of discounts they happen to be giving.

Well, if they want everyone to just switch over to trades, this ain’t the way to do it. I rarely get trades, although they do make great gifts.

Wasn’t Thor #600 more than 100 pages, by itself? For $5? That thing’s huge at any rate; I have to give Marvel credit for good value this once. Compare to Neil Gaiman Batman for… well, anywhere from $15 to $25 apparently.

Hey DC, “Whatever Happened to A Fair Price?”

Its a corporation. They charge what they think they can get. Here, we have a product, aimed at the bookstore market, at more-or-less the same price point as Sandman trades. In the fiction bookstore market, product is generally priced depending on authors and desirability rather than number of pages.

Seems like a smart move to me.

Very odd, especially when compared to the price of a hardcover from the Vertigo line.

Examples

Y: The Last Man Deluxe Edition 1 – 256 pages – $29.99
Y: The Last Man Deluxe Edition 2 – 320 pages – $29.99

And the second one is yet to be released, so it’s part of the current solicits.

Very odd pricing moves for DCU material in that context

I might have waited for the trade on the Gaiman Batman story had I known they were packaging it with those old stories. Hell, I may skip part 2 and do that anyway.

Also; “It really seems like their policy is, “What? You’ll pay it, so what do you expect?””

Are you saying that like this is a new strategy for them?

‘It really seems like their policy is, “What? You’ll pay it, so what do you expect?”’

Well, yeah? It’s known as “monopolistic pricing”, and DC has it figured out. It’ll be $25 for the oversized, deluxe format, limited print-run hardcover. Then probably $20 for the regular-sized hardcover when they sell out of those. And then probably somewhere in the $15-$16 range for the paperback that will stay in print for as long as they can sell them. (Though they may skip over the regular-sized hardcover – I imagine that will depend on how quickly the oversized hardcover sells through).

That pretty much gets everyone who might buy it at the price point they can afford (and that is profitable to print the book at). It’s what happens when you have a monopoly on a particular item and can recoup enough costs from the folks who will pay the higher value to pay for the work enough to drop down the price and then capture a new group of customers. Same principle as selling DVD releases at $25-$35 on the day of release and then slowly dropping them over time until you can find them on an endcap at Target for $10 or less. Or showing a movie in a theater that charges $10 a ticket for first run movies and then turning around and showing it in a theater that charges $2 a ticket a few months later. Works great in the entertainment industry, where certain people pay a premium to be able to get things “first” or in a high quality package or with lots of extras and other folks just don’t want to spend the money and are willing to wait for a cheaper package.

They’ll keep doing it until it isn’t profitable anymore. Heck the entire trade paperback collection model right now is built on people (usually) paying a premium to buy the individual issues up front when they could just wait and get it cheaper in the trade collection.

It really seems like their policy is, “What? You’ll pay it, so what do you expect?

Same reason why DC and Marvel put out dozens of books a month of sub-par material — enough people will still buy it to turn a profit. I could spring $25 on an OVERSIZED (this is the key word here) printing of several good stories… but there are loads out there that would spring even more money on several terrible stories, too (somebody out there probably owns the whole set of Countdown trades…ugh). Why blame a company for trying to turn a profit when it knows that it can? We can complain all we want and demand DC and Marvel sell $1.99 comics, but as long as people will pay $3.99 for the same thing, why should they? Sure it’s unfair, but nobody is forced to buy it.

This isn’t exclusive to comics, by the way. I was in a bookstore the other day and noticed that was Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not” — which is less than 200 pages — is selling for $15.99 in PAPERBACK, while a similar-sized paperback (but 650 page) anthology of his short stories sells for $19.99. How does that make sense?

I bet my library will get one or both of these despite the price though I really wish they’d get the DCU hardcover.

The solicits for ‘…Man Of Tomorrow’ says the hardcover only includes that story, ‘For The Man Who Has Everything’ and DC Comics Presents #85. Those are all classics, but they’re ALL in the Alan Moore DC Universe trade.

DC’s current hardcover prices are absurd. As well as their choices of what to reprint.

The Kryptonite Nevermore story, a classic 70s Superman epic. Great choice to reprint!
The Monster Society of Evil, a classic 40s Captain Marvel epic. Glorious!
The George Perez JLA volume 1, classic 80s work by an artistic master! Great!
Batman Annuals, volume 1. Reprinting the best of the 50s Batman, which isn’t likely to get a full reprinting any time soon. Okay.
The Best of Ferro Lad, a handful of 60s Legion stories that feature a single Legionnaire. What?
Flash of Two Earths, a bunch of crossovers, many of which have been reprinted several times. Really?

And all of these (well, Monster Society of Evil isn’t fully solicited yet) are going for the same price.

The big issue is that DC has picked some really dreadful volumes, the target audience for whom already owns them in hardcover already, which are also readily available in Showcase Presents volumes.

Now, the Whatever Happened To… volumes have the saving grace that along with reprinting two oversized issues featuring the characters in question, they also reprint every bit of work that the creator has done with that character. The Caped Crusader volume reprints Neil Gaiman’s Poison Ivy Origin, presumably his Ridder origin and other material from the Secret Origins Annual (which also had a John Constantine cameo!). It is a bit pricey, but with the economy the way it is right now, I can understand where DC is coming from.

But as long as we’re talking about DC’s latest collected edition solicits, let’s give them kudos for the totally awesome Black Casebook TPB (finally!), the fact that Superman Beyond and Submit appear to have been extracted from the Final Crisis Companion (did I miss something, or does that mean they’ve been moved to the FC hardcover?), and the possibility of new Hitman trades. It’s gonna be an expensive month, but it’s not all bad!

“So what, you’ll pay it” they said to their tiny-and-still-shrinking audience.

So apparently the Final Crisis HC has gone up by about 100 pages. Looks like they’ve decided to collect the series properly, which is BRILLIANT.

On these ‘Whatever Happened To…’ deluxe HCs, yes, they’re expensive, but, you know, it’s Moore and Gaiman. You get what you pay for. You can always wait for the SCs, anyway. Ok,I’ll shut up now.

It is a bit pricey, but with the economy the way it is right now, I can understand where DC is coming from.

Yeah, because in times of economic hardship, putting prices up is always the way to success.

Wait, there’s a Monster Society of Evil collection coming out? I’ve been waiting for that ever since I first heard of the story many years ago. I thought for sure they’d put out a collection of the original when Jeff Smith did his (awesome) Monster Society book, but was sadly mistaken. I know the original was collected back in the 70s or 80s, but it’s been impossible to find.

A collection of 50s Batman stuff would be great, too, as long as it’s not the same stories that have been included in various other Batman collections over the years. Those two I’d be willing to pay $40 for. The rest, no way.

Their whole hardcover sales plan is screwed. If something that came out recently isn’t a classic, guess what? No one with a brain is going to buy a hardcover edition. Ever. Trades and other paperbacks are a better way to buy recent comics, probably the best way, certainly better than buying individual issues nowadays, and Marvel sees my money because of that. I don’t see how it’s working out for DC, but it must be.

Well call me The Straw Man, because I’ll be buying the hardcover.

I often get the hardcover, if it comes in that format, on projects I think will be worth keeping in a nice solid format.

I also think you’re ignoring the fact that Marvel regularly does Premiere Edition Hardcovers before trade releases.

Well actually, I am brainless, because it’s Scarecrow without a brain isn’t it….

Fuck me and my sarcastic childrens literature references…

Yeah, I don’t get referencing Marvel here – their hardcover policy is pretty “bad,” too.

@Jazzbo:

They brought out a similarly over-sized, overpriced hardcover of Jeff Smith’s Shazam stuff.

It’s actually fairly comparable to this. The oversized H/c is $29 for 240 pages, while the trade is $19 for 208 pages. Don’t ask me what the extra pages are in the h/c but they’re not story content.

Those prices are absurd but that’s coming from someone who was suckered into buying the Deadman collection for $75

Also, is this any weirder than Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia for €25 for 90 pages?
It’s not a new thing.

There is the further issue that most DC hardcovers are either in terrible paper (why the heck does anyone make a hardcover with ordinary paper anyway?) or have poor reproduction (Camelot 3000).

And the Absolute line has always been horribly overpriced. I bought the Watchmen volume (hey, it’s Watchmen!) and the relatively few extras don’t justify the 75 dollar price tag.

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

I’ll just wait for a convention where I can get these books for 50% off.

I must admit I was first excited by th new DC Classic Library line. I like the concept of reproducing some of the best self contained runs and/or storylines of DC’s Silver and Bronze Ages. After I bought the first volume, the “Kryptonite No More” run by Denny O’Neil and the great Curt Swan, I am sorry to say that I am very disappointed about the poor quality reproduction. It looks like a bad photocopy of the original comic book. Not worth $40 at all.

I agree about the Absolute editions prices, Absolutely too expensives for my wallet.

And why are the DC Archives so much more expensive than the similar Marvel Masterworks editions????

Yeah, I don’t get referencing Marvel here – their hardcover policy is pretty “bad,” too.

Do they have a policy?

I think they, DC to but especially Marvel, really need to figure out some consistent guidelines for what gets a hardcover and what doesn’t.
Take Captain America, I was waitingg for a twelve issue hardback of the Brubaker run, instead they did ‘Premiere Editions’, trades and then a giant sized omnibus.
As opposed to all their other books which go Premiere Edition, softcover, hardback, omnibus.

And personally, could both companies get rid of the slim hardbacks?
It makes sense on ‘special’ projects like All Star Superman, but with something like Incredible Hercules, just give me the trade already!

I gave up on DC hardcovers when they split “Justice” into three volumes at $19.99 a pop retail. Marvel put 13 issues of The Ultimates 1 and 2 in one book each for $29.99, and the paper quality is so much better to boot.

Not really a huge deal, just get it off Amazon for 35% less.

I gave up on DC hardcovers when they split “Justice” into three volumes at $19.99 a pop retail. Marvel put 13 issues of The Ultimates 1 and 2 in one book each for $29.99, and the paper quality is so much better to boot.

That was the old days of Marvel hardcovers, they do the same thing these days.

[...] Brian Cronin has already noted this, but it’s worth repeating: pretty much everything in the Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? hardcover also appears in the latest edition of the DC Universe Stories Of Alan Moore paperback. [...]