The Price of comics...

This was a comment in the pandemic thread, and it got me thinking.  Maybe this is of no interest to anyone else, but I find it fascinating.

anonxyzus wrote: I read through the thread. A lot of different opinions here. I've got to say, though, that what makes the biggest impression on me is the price 
of comics. The last time I bought a comic book, it cost 12 cents.

At that price, a kid (me) could go through the clothes in his parents 
closets and find enough change for at least one, and maybe two or three 
comic books.

When someone says "X was $Y in YEAR", part of me automatically wants to go try to figure out what $Y YEAR USD is in current USD.  That is, after you adjust for inflation, what is 12 cents of 1962 USD worth today?

And, since I'm a geek, I used the cover price of action comics. I ignored special issues (400, 500, etc).  I also didn't care too much if the price was the same all year, if I noticed the price went up, I used that price for the year.  If you wanted to be exact, you'd need to take the cover price of every month and chart that ... but that's 12x the work and I'm not in for that, plus the inflation adjustment is only down to the year so... it's not really that important.

So, here's a chart of year vs cover price and inflation-adjusted price.  I used this to convert to the  Value of USD to today  (There are others but it seemed reasonable enough.)

If the price holds steady for a few years, naturally, the 2020 USD price drops each year.   So you see the adjusted price on a drop all through the 80's as the cover price holds steady.  The two lines have to join in 2020 by definition.

A common answer to "When did comics start to die" is "the late 70's when the direct market began".  In the 90's the non-direct market (book stores, grocery stores, corner drug stores, etc) basically went away.  And from that point, you can see the steady rise in the cost of a comic book.  The sad thing is the stores we love are responsible for the state the industry is in, and collectors are a big part of the problem.   A lot of people credit the explosion of interest in the Death of Superman comic as driving the industry up ... but it was people buying multiple copies as "investments" not people who wanted to READ the comic ... and when that market crashed ... it wasn't pretty.

If you care about the history of the US direct market and comic book stores, this is an excellent book: Comic Shop: The Retail Mavericks Who Gave Us a New Geek Culture  It goes over the major things of the birth of the market and the collapse into one distributor (etc).  Lots of internal history of Marvel and DC too. ('no returns" was an essential part of creating the direct market and has been there since the beginning.)

Sorry no info for UK comics

Some milestones (all $ values are in 2020 USD):

Comics were > $1.00 before 1960
Comics hit $1.50 in 1977 (actually 1.49).
$2 was roughly 89/90 (it was just under that mark)  (Comics are over 2x expensive today as they were in 1991!)
$2.50 was 1993
$3 1996  (in 1991 comics were 48% of today's cost.  In 96 they were 80% of today's cost!)
$4.80 in 2009  (this is the most expensive year)

Action Comics (and most Marvel/DC Comics) are currently $4.  I am wondering if the price is going to go up as it's overdue.  The big 2 have been avoiding cost increases fairly well.  DC has "card stock covers" which I think is an EXCELLENt idea.  Make an inexpensive version for the readers and an expensive one for the collectors (it's $1 more). The industry has to find a balance between collectors and readers.

Comics were $3.37 2020 USD in 2000 (cover price $2.25) or 85% of the $3.99 price of a comic today.  Not that big of an increase in the last 20 years.  But the real problems started in the 90's and the result of that is no new readers and the only way to get them is to somehow attract them into a comic book store.  The top-selling comics are roughly the same as the late 90's.  The top-selling comic in March 2020 (Spider-Woman #1!)  sold just over 140K copies... in the late 90's a top 3 comic probably was 150-170k baring a special event.  So overall sales are down but not horribly.   The big vendors are doing fairly well with additional digital sales and trade sales over the 90's (it's all new money).  This doesn't help the stores that much ... though they do benefit from selling more Trades.

All the main problems facing stores were present in 2000.  (Bad comics existed in 2000 just like in 2019.)  Marvel and DC have some tricks to drive stores crazy (excessive churning #1's, printing a comic 2x/ month) -- but that's again a process/ordering guestimate thing.

If anyone wants to see the spreadsheet let me know, I can post it, I just thought the chart told the story pretty well.

I come up with different numbers here - and maybe a different understanding - but I'm not sure:  A $0.12 comic in 1960 would be $26.00 in today's dollars if I understand right.  www.usinflationcalculator.com/

I for one don't understand how these publishers have survived as long as they have charging so little. 

140K for Spiderwoman #1 = $560,000 in revenue.
Say half goes to the retailer ($2.00 per comic for lights, credit card processing, payroll).  Even this seems like a business plan disaster.
We are left with $2.00 per comic.
Let's say another half of that goes to printing, packing, shipping, and other overhead.
$140,000 divided between Writer, Artist, Ink, Colors, Editors, Admin for a month of effort on the *best* selling comic that will subsidize the duds seems like thin margins if they are paying for offices and healthcare.

What are digital sales like, really?  No one seems to spend even decent money on digital advertising.

Random321 wrote: I come up with different numbers here - and maybe a different understanding - but I'm not sure:  A $0.12 comic in 1960 would be $26.00 in today's dollars if I understand right.  www.usinflationcalculator.com/

I for one don't understand how these publishers have survived as long as they have charging so little. 

140K for Spiderwoman #1 = $560,000 in revenue.
Say half goes to the retailer ($2.00 per comic for lights, credit card processing, payroll).  Even this seems like a business plan disaster.
We are left with $2.00 per comic.
Let's say another half of that goes to printing, packing, shipping, and other overhead.
$140,000 divided between Writer, Artist, Ink, Colors, Editors, Admin for a month of effort on the *best* selling comic that will subsidize the duds seems like thin margins if they are paying for offices and healthcare.

What are digital sales like, really?  No one seems to spend even decent money on digital advertising.

I think you didn’t clear the page right.  $26 is what $1 2013 USD in 2020 USD is (the defaults on the page)  If you make sure it clicks to 1962, and takes the input to 0.10, you get a different answer. (The same thing happened to me until I figured out it wasn’t catching the change on my mobile device.)

Also, the #’s are worse.  Diamond takes a cut, so Marvel is really making 40-45% of the cover price!  And THEN they have to print the comics.

But the production costs are about $1k-$1.5k a page.

Re:   www.creatorresource.com/page-rates-2017/

So that’s $25k-$50k a comic.

Digital gets 50% of the cover price, but the market is 20% the size.  OTH, it doesn’t have print costs and it can sell for years after the original run.  (Marvel probably makes $1.60 off selling a print copy of Spider-Woman, but $2 for selling a digital copy.  A digital sale is also a sale to an end user, NOT to a comic book store.)

But you’re right the #’s look pretty bad.

Since we know Marvel isn’t going bankrupt, that means:

- we don’t’ know how to calculate Marvels Printing costs (I’ve not tried to talk to anyone who knows the actual answer to this, and I didnt’ find it on a quick google. I do know Marvel prints comics for other people — and that’s likely another way to up their volume and thus lower their printing costs.
- We don’t know how much Marvel makes from running Ads in comic books.
- Could be wrong on the % marvel makes off cover — this is one of the place where I’d defer to a Store Owner as they have the real #’s.  (I’m going to ask once we can go out again, and see if I can get a general # from some of the local stores.)
- the page rates fluctuate based on the names involved and the comic.

To make a 10k print run profitable Marvel has to be making some $$ by either reduced printing costs and/or advertising and/or using lower tier (cheaper) talent to reduce the production costs.

For Marvel (in particular) they have a separate unit for Merchandising so  I don’t think that helps the print side.

All I know is that the #’s look .. bad.. .which means that something doesn’t add up right (it’s probably advertising).

100% right - I didn't click.  I'm sure you could tell I thought the numbers were strange.

Well - so much for me thinking comic book companies were doing almost a public service selling their books for so little.

Random321 wrote: 100% right - I didn't click.  I'm sure you could tell I thought the numbers were strange.

Well - so much for me thinking comic book companies were doing almost a public service selling their books for so little.

The thing that gets me is how much DC and Marvel have both tried to hold prices for the last 10 years.  DC even experimenting in dropping the price a $1 (you can see it at the end of the chart) before returning back to $4.

it’s probably the longest the price has held since the 80’s!  So, I do think it’s fair to say that they ARE really trying to keep the prices down after the huge ramp-up of the 90’s.  A 15% rise since 2000 Doesnt’ seem too bad.

I just love comics and I love trying to figure out how things work too.  Which is what this was.  AN exercise to look at the pricing history of comics in some kind of normalized context.

The secondary thing of trying to figure out where the $$ comes from ... that’s interesting too.  I mean it’s a WAG (Wild Assed Guess, it’s a technical engineering term), but it gets the shape of things down and leaves some variables to fill in.  But it’s also a good trial run to reality check things.  I can tell by looking at our numbers we aren’t accounting for something. . 

The math is different for kickstarter books.  And the print price varies on paper, cover type, print run (etc).  But none of these get the deals that DC or Marvel get for printing.  Marvel prints 500k+ comics ever month.  That changes things.

We really can’t run this the other way (figure out what a store would make) unless we know what their average non-sell rate is, and that’s going to be so highly variable per store that I don’t know if you can really do it.   So many stores are different from one another.    Some stores thrive off selling a diverse collection of new comics with huge pull lists.  Some mainly sell old comics.  Some do games.  Some do a bit of all of them. (Etc).  Just hard to figure out how it all works.

But I don’t think anyone gets rich in this biz.  The ones that do tend to do it by selling movie rights. 

I do think all stores are going to have to all figure out how to sell on the internet (eBay, store, etc).

But the most interesting recent development is DC putting weight behind making a second distributor.  It probably won’t’ last, but it’s a noble experiment. 










 

Heh.  I guess it doesn't matter how much Marvel was making off digital sales on their website.  Just got an email that it's shutting down on June 2nd.  "you can still buy marvel comics digitally on Comixology.com".

No change to the digital codes and redemption on the site.

You can still read any marvel comics you bought from them on the  marvel site -- but you can also sync it to Comixology (if you haven't already) and read them there.   The sync to Comixology has been there from the beginning and any codes you redeem or books you buy have synced over to Comixology instantly from the get go.

The sync works in the other direction too (if you buy a marvel comic on Comixology I'm pretty sure the marvel site recognizes that.)

Also, since Amazon owns Comixology if you link Comixology to Amazon, any comics you buy on the Amazon site directly automatically sync over to Comixology.

(DC, when they did the digital redemption coupon thing, had the same sync to Comixology.)