Comic Book Resources

Things were less expensive 35 years ago? Holy shit! Call the Action News Team!

“O’Neil argues that the water level of quality hasn’t really risen above where it was even in the worst of the 90s glut.”

Have to agree with that. But it has always been that way. Remember Sturgeon’s Law (Theodore Sturgeon, science fiction writer): “Ninety percent of everything is crud.” That includes 90% of comic books, 90% of the music out there, 90% of politicians, etc.

Not belitting the good stuff being published right now, but there are so many crappy comics being published, with crappy art and crappy stories. Have to wonder who is buying that trash…

The problem is that comics were dramatically less expensive 35, 25, even 15 years ago, even when you adjust for inflation.

The four dollar comic has officially retired me from floppies. It’s back issues and trades only for me from now on.

The Japanese model it’s very interesting: you buy an inexpensive, telephone directory-sized comic, with a 90% of crap, but at least you can try a lot of new series and authors for less than 3,99$. The remaining 10% is good,and it’s later reprinted as a paperback. The problem with American comics is that they print real shit in the glossy paper we use to dream of back in the 80′s(Baxter Titans, Lee X-Men…), wrap it with a decent cover(or covers!!) and try to sell it for the same price of an All-Star Superman issue. At least bad movies go straight to video…

Just to give you a point of comparison, go back to the 70s, after gas prices had fallen back to a semblence of stability from the Embargo.

mid-late 70s
Comics were 15 cents each, about to transition to 25 cents around the time that the Star Wars adaptations came out.
Gasoline was still occasionally in the 60 cents per gallon range (for those outside the US, for the price of one comic, your parents could get 1 liter of gas).
Candy bars cost 25 cents or less.
You could go to a store, and get more pieces of loose, individually wrapped, candy (bubblegum, tootsie roll minis, jawbreakers), than the pennies you spent (usually 1-2 items a penny, with a quarter getting you 30-50 items, depending on your choices.
A McDonalds hamburger cost about 15-20 cents. Sometimes, restaurants would have sales of 8 or 10 for a dollar.

Mid 80s
Comics were in the 40-60 cent range; then the glossy ones came out that cost $1-$1.50, but that was seen as getting better comics for your money.
Gasoline was in the 70 to 90 cents a gallon range
candy bars were in the 33-45 cent range.
Mix and match Bags of candy was no more (thanks to all the doctored candy hoaxes/scares), but you could still get a bag of halloween candy for about 1-2 pennies a piece within.
Most restaurants were now charging around 40-50 cents each for a regular hamburger; some places even cheaper (one of my favorite 1985 college hang-outs was driving with my friends after midnight to a 24-hour BK 2 miles from school that had 25 cent hamburgers). Things like the Wendy’s single, Big Mac, and Whopper were just then hitting the dollar mark.

90s, and the market flood.
Comics cost $1.25-$1.75
Gas started staying in the $1.00-1.50 range, depending on your location (this was the period when state taxes started making visable differences from state to state on gas prices).
Candy Bars stabilized around 50 cents each, with the occasional sale of cheaper ones – and the appearance of the $1 king-sized bars. However, the normal bars started to shrink a little (most apparent with Reese Cups), but this was a century-old phenomenon (Going back to Mr. Hershey, the size of the bar was based on the target price point; something I learned watching shows on the history of candy).
regular hamburgers got up to around $1, or a bit cheaper if the meat was skimped on. The large burgers got outrageous.

mid to late 2000s
Comics got into the $2.50, then $3-4 range
Gas shot up to $4 a gallon from crises (natural, and ones manufactured by supposed environmentalists that won’t let the oil companies build more compact, high-tech, cleaner, safer facilities, and be able to shut down and clean up the ones dating from the Eisenhower administration, but I digress), then dropped back down to stabilize in the $2.50 to $3 per gallon range.
Candy bars range from 50 cents at supermarkets to $1 at corner stores (volume means a lot), with occasional promotions that can bring the prices down to 33-69 cents, before tax.
Hamburger prices haven’t really changed, but the competition in the market has led to bigger or better burgers at the existing price points, and the prices getting made up for with the fries and drinks, and less over-the-top profit-taking. In some cases, they’ve even gone down.

Analysis:
BEFORE adjusting for inflation,
Burger prices have gone up by about 500-600%, but you get about twice the burger you did in the carter administration, or the burger is roughly the same size, but with higher quality ingredients.
Candy Bars have gone up about 400% (300%, plus an additional factor for the smaller sizes), but there is much more variety to choose from, and you can still get good deals.
Gasoline has gone up 400%, but about 100% of that is in taxes.
comics prices have gone up 2000%, and only about half that can be attributed to quality improvements (writers, artists, materials).

Adjusting for 3 years of inflation from 1977 to 2007 (at a rate of 1 dollar then equal to about $3.38 now):
Burger prices have effectively doubled to tripled, but you get much more than you paid for back then, and of higher quality meat (example: a 1970s regular hamburger was typically 10-12 patties per lb., sometimes as small as 16 /lb. now they are 6-9 per lb.)
Candy Bar prices have doubled, but quality and selection have increased.
Gasoline prices are only marginally higher, once you factor out tax increases. Most of the non-tax increases are from the costs of having to try to repair and modernize existing facilities as opposed to replacing them, and product reformulations to reduce pollution. The actual profit per gallon, as a fraction of the price, has actually gone DOWN, as the companies still make about the same cents per gallon now as in the 70s (even though those cents are worth 1/3 as much after inflation).

Even after adusting for inflation, comics prices have increased at THREE TO FOUR TIMES the rate of the others. And, that’s taking into account that the products in comparison ALSO, like comics, improved their products substantially in the intervening years. Even if one allows that comics improved their product twice as much as the others in my comparison, that still means that their cost adjusted for inflation increased TWICE as much as practically everything else in the economy.

Unfortunately, the economic model of American comic books is to get as much money as they can from a dwindling fanbase. There’s nothing to indicate that any company is really looking to expand the fanbase. As a result “value comics”, such as anthologies on inexpensive paper don’t sell because the only people they’re marketed to, don’t want them.

Even the independents seem unwilling to try anything that might actually expand their fanbase.

We already know that movies and TV shows don’t really help sell comics and especially don’t attract long time fans. Of course long time fans aren’t really what they should be aiming for. They should be trying to hook casual fans. Like every other entertainment medium, the bulk of the money comes from the people in the middle who might or might not purchase a book or ticket based on how something is presented.

For example, I hear a song on the radio, it might prompt me to buy the album or go to a concert. My local team just signed a big name free agent, so it might be worth going to a game or two this year.

Basara549, you’ve set your mid to late ’70s comic prices too low. They hit 25 cents in the early ’70s. Star Wars #1 was published with both .30 and .35 cover prices.

It’s also worth noting that comic prices were kept artificially low until the ’70s, compared with magazine prices. In the ’30s, comics cost 10 cents, magazines 25 cents. Magazines kept getting more expensive, but comics stayed at a dime until 1961. Much like the standard Hershey bar, they kept cutting pages rather than increase the price. The ’60s saw a combination of price increases and more advertising pages until comics only had 17 pages of story by the mid-’70s.

I understand it varied by location, but your gas prices seem a bit low. By the late 70′s/early 80′s $1.00 gas prices were the norm. There was a dramatic decrease in 1986 (the first year I owned a car) due to disagreements between OPEC members leading to some members over producing and undercutting the others. I believe it got back down to about $0.60 in my area. Once they put there production limits back in place, the prices went back up.

Also, I started reading comics in late 1985 and most if not all were already $0.75

Give me $125 and I can buy like eight good books, right off the shelf.

Another thing to take into account is the decrease in ad revenue. As comics readership has shrunk, they’re getting less money from advertisers. Also, the number of products willing to advertise in comics has shrunk. Remember those Hostess ads? Do you think any such mass appeal product would advertise in a comic today? Print advertising had shrunk dramatically in the last decade .

Things were less expensive 35 years ago? Holy shit! Call the Action News Team!

Rick Williams and Jim Gardner have better things to report about, like blog readers’ failed reading comprehension skills.

Have to agree with that. But it has always been that way. Remember Sturgeon’s Law (Theodore Sturgeon, science fiction writer): “Ninety percent of everything is crud.” That includes 90% of comic books, 90% of the music out there, 90% of politicians, etc.

Proportionately, sure, 90% of everything is crap; but there are so many more comics these days– yes, moreso than during the 90s glut (when I’d say 98% of everything was crap)– that that 10% is a lot of books, certainly a lot more than I can keep up with.

At least bad movies go straight to video

But sometimes, they make a billion dollars theatrically.

Give me $125 and I can buy like eight good books, right off the shelf.

Or 250 good books at a library sale.

I, too, am shocked that comics cost more today than they did in yesteryear.

Cars, too. What has happened to out world?

I think it should be mentioned that comics cost 10 cents for decades, from the 30s to the 60s. Why can’t they still be 10 cents today?

And why do people get gray hair?

They could still be ten cents today, but for that, you’d just get half a page of comics and an ad on one piece of paper.

They were ten cents because they were considered cheap and disposable. They had much higher print runs and used the cheapest materials available. Selling outright reprints of older comics was common occurrence. At best you might get some updated dialog. There’s also something that goes into the price of every product. “How much is someone willing to pay for this” Look at the cost of “designer” clothes. Do you think they really cost that much more to make than the one sold at Target? No, they don’t but there’s someone willing to pay for the name.

I was hoping somebody linked to that.

But the price increase is really a side-note to Spurgeon’s argument – It’s that the quality and quantity of product released is so, so, SO much better than it ever has been in the past – Enough so that it more’n makes up for the raising-of-prices.

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