NO.

[bumblemusprime]

NO. NO.

http://www.theouthousers.com/index.php/ ... tions.html

[Ozz]

Some of those are oversized or "special" issues, but do you really believe this isn't the beginning of "the new normal?" Yeah, we don't either.

ALL of them are oversized, and those were always going for more than $3.99. When 32-page issues start going for $.4.99, that will be new normal. This is not it.

[Professor Smooth]

At $5 per issue, I'd hope that they can actually get those issues out *on time*.

Seriously, months-long delays mid-story would be completely unnacceptable in *any* other form of entertainment. (Insert Song of Ice and Fire joke here)

What if you bought a ticket to Guardians of the Galaxy, got 35 minutes into the movie, then the lights came up and the theater guy said "Sorry, but they're not done with the movie yet, come back next week to see the rest of it." Then, a few days later, they offered to let you watch a work print with director commentary for a dollar *more* than the original ticket price.

This is the digital age. If your book looks like it'll be running late, use a bunch of fill-in artists, and include a digital code for the *finished* version. Or a coupon for a few bucks off the eventual (finished) trade version. But at $5 per issue, there'd better not be any more delays that wind up holding up the release of a half-dozen MORE $5 books.

[Bumblebot]

Some of those are oversized or "special" issues, but do you really believe this isn't the beginning of "the new normal?" Yeah, we don't either.

ALL of them are oversized, and those were always going for more than $3.99. When 32-page issues start going for $.4.99, that will be new normal. This is not it.

I'm not sure which would be worse, an increase in price for a 32-page, or a reduction in pages for the same price, or who it would be worse for.

I was reading an old 50's/60's DC comic (Action Comics, probably) a few months back and it had a whole page devoted to explaining to its readers why it was going to raise in price by 2¢, and it was basically that they started in the 40's with 68-page anthology issues, then as time went on they dropped features, the page count went down to 32, then to 28, then finally to 24. They didn't want to go down to 20, so they were having to raise the price in order to meet rising costs.

Point is, costs increase, currencies devalue, and despite their best efforts, they end up selling their product for more to try make up the shortfall. Not excusing them, but it's not something that's peculiar to comics.

[bumblemusprime]

Market forces aren't all straight inflation, though. Mass printing is cheaper. Ebooks account for a larger percentage of sales, so companies are printing fewer paper copies. This is partially just because single issues are big fat money losers, and because Diamond raised minimum orders five years ago, right about the time Marvel embraced $3.99. Two years later DC consolidated and big-hyped the New 52.

The system is going to make floppies more and more expensive and (greedily) correlate the electronic copies. Floppies have been doomed to be a niche market ever since the rise of the TPB and the eBooks, but this is going to affect the cost of TPBs and e-copies.

[Professor Smooth]

There has got to be an upward limit to what people, by and large, are willing to pay for 22 page pamphlets. I think that limit would be $5. At $6, that means you can't even get two books for a tennner. At $6, I have a feeling you'd see the sales immediately drop on a *lot* of books.

Perhaps the American comic book industry could take a few tips from the Japan.

There are a dozen or so large volumes of comics released on a weekly or monthly basis. The shortest of these is usually more than 200 pages. The paper is cheap (newsprint, basically), but so are the prices. Inside, you'll get somewhere between 8 and 40(!) serialized stories for between $4 and $8.

After enough of the chapters of each story have been published in this format, a nicer, much higher quality trade is released.

If one story is running late (cough, EVANGELION!), you'll still have plenty of others to hold you over until the delay is resolved.

Of course, each issue is just *packed* with advertisements (like most magazines are) to offset the costs.

I really think that this could work outside Japan as well. Publish maybe 5 or 10 different black and white comic magazines every month. Low quality paper. Just, super cheap. Charge $10-ish bucks each. If there's a delay with an artist, use a fill-in when necessary.

Then release the trades in full-color with completed art from the "superstar" artist who was having trouble keeping to the schedule.

This would *especially* work for smaller publishers. Picking up a brand new title (especially one with a $5 cover price) is a gamble. For every Saga, Walking Dead, and Spawn, there are a dozen Brigades, Girls, and Necrowars, where, even if they're not complete ****, you run the risk of the creators just quitting before the story's finished. If that happened to *one* story in a magazine you were already buying for *other* stories, it may suck, but it's not like you're really out any money.

This seems like a more forward-thinking solution to making comic books profitable than going back to multiple covers, incentive covers, and goddamn holograms. I think I read that the new Death of Wolverine series is going to feature some combination of 3-D foil die-cut covers. That's fine for a short-term gimmick, but it's not sustainable.