The High Price of Comics
Recently I’ve experienced a resurgence of interest in comics in my personal life. Like so many things I do, I throw myself headlong into it. I’ve been buying up both single issues and graphic novels lately. Even more importantly, I’ve been reading them.
One of the things that I am really starting to appreciate about comics is the artwork. It’s something I’ve always been drawn to, but nowadays, I seem to notice it more. Good or bad artwork can make or break a good title. When I stopped buying single issues it was because certain comics quality of artwork went so horribly bad that I didn’t even want to read them, despite the strength of their writing.
I’m not a collector of comics, I’m definitely in the reading camp. That’s why the current comic market is something of a double edged sword for me. As much as I love to read the stories of these larger than life characters, the prices on their stories continue to skyrocket.
The average price for a comic from one of the large publishers (DC, Marvel, Dark Horse) is $2.99 to $3.99. That’s for a 32-page comic book with 4-6 pages of ads, depending on the publisher and the title. I’m paying $2.99 for about 28 pages of material. On average, it will take me 5-20 minutes to read a comic. Assuming I read slower, savoring every word balloon and every splash page, that means that I would pay roughly $9.00/hour for comic book entertainment. By that calculation, that makes them even more expensive than movies, and far less expensive than the overpriced novels sold nowadays.
Some of this can be mitigated through the purchase of graphic novels and pulp-printed B&W (occasionally color) collections of older material. This is one of the ways that I’m catching up on a lot of the older comic material that I never read in my misspent youth is to purchase Marvel and DC “phone book” collections. These are reprint collections printed on cheap paper in B&W that collect entire runs of comics. I have several of these in my library including ones for Doctor Strange, the Savage Sword of Conan (great buy from Dark Horse, mostly because the original art/release was in B&W anyway), Sgt. Rock, Doc Savage, and John Carter of Mars. These make excellent travel companions because they are 300-500 pages each, contain entire issues minus the ads and letters pages (regrettably), and are a good bargain at $18-$20 each. This is somewhat in contrast to what I mentioned above about artwork, but one of the interesting things is that good artwork shines, even when it’s not fully reproduced.
Graphic novels are also going up in price, but are still much more reasonable than hunting down individual issues. Since they collect entire story arcs into one place, you don’t have to usually worry about tracking down crossovers or elusive low print-run issues. I don’t mind buying graphic novels, but some do start to stretch the boundaries of acceptable price, especially some of the Marvel titles.
Rational calculations frequently do not keep company with the short-lived pleasure centers of our brains. I will continue to buy and enjoy comics, but there will be fewer that make it into my shopping bag every Wednesday.
