Not so these days. A shrinking market, coupled with expensive production, is driving comic prices ever-upwards. The price of an individual Marvel comic is already creeping up to $3.99 for a regular sized issue – 32 pages, with approximately 20-24 of story and the rest made up of ads. Once Marvel raises its prices, DC is rarely far behind. It’s a massive jump from the previous standard price of $2.99, which has been maintained for a couple of years now, but it seems that this may actually be the point that comics are finally becoming too expensive for most buyers. Increasingly, then, the smart way to buy comics is not to get the individual issues at all – collections are often much cheaper, contain no adverts, and while they come out less frequently, you get more story when you do buy one. After all, most comics released these days aren’t single-issue stories in their own right, but chapters of a larger work – would anyone buy novels in this format, knowing that it’ll work out more expensively? Publishers seem oddly determined to make buying monthly comics a stupid choice. If every comics reader stopped buying monthlies, though, the industry would probably collapse overnight. Monthly readers are essential to the big publishers’ cashflow, so we’re told, but if that’s the case, why are they the first ones to feel the burden of higher prices? I’ve been buying comics for well over a decade, and the last year or so is the first time I’ve found myself dropping books for financial reasons. I’m a huge fan of Brian Wood, but after buying the first 3 issues of the fantastic Northlanders – each issue costing $2.99 each – I discovered that the eventual collection of the first 8 issues would be only $9.99. As much as I wanted to read it monthly, I just couldn’t afford to keep buying the single issues at that massive a mark-up. From now on, I’m getting the series in trade format. “Waiting for the trade” (as it’s called) isn’t without its moral dilemmas, of course. In the case of some series, monthly sales are all that keeps them from being cancelled – without the monthly support, there might never be a trade paperback to wait for. Creators, too, might rely on the income monthly sales provide. Luckily, one trend on the rise for independent creators is to add “backmatter” into individual issues which then doesn’t appear in the trade. Essays and sketches are inexpensive to print in an issue, but excluded from trade collections, they reward monthly supporters of a series without damaging the integrity of the story on offer. This kind of imaginative approach to single-issue presentation is one way to ensure that monthlies remain a viable format. Ultimately, if bigger publishers want to soften the blow of price increases, then perhaps they should take a leaf out of what smaller ones do and provide content that isn’t little more than thinly-veiled in-house advertising, and start thinking about whether they’re going to offer anything in return for that extra dollar – otherwise, they’re just going to give us another reason not to go into the comic shop this week.
