Taking A Bite Into Comic Book Vampires
If you clicked on today’s article hoping to hear about Vampirella, Baron Blood, Morbius or Andrew Bennett then I’ve afraid I’m going to disappoint you. No, today’s article is about how the comic book industry is trying to bleed us dry of every penny they can get.
First I want to talk about an indy publisher called Big City Comics. They publish two titles: Tesla and Hyde: Scary Fails and Killing Mars. Killing Mars is the book that appealed to me a few months ago when I first saw it in Previews. It’s about a criminal with a bounty on his head, who hires a team of female mercenaries to protect him from the mob. Sounded like fun, but one of the benefits of Previews is that they tell you the price and the number of pages the comic is. Killing Mars is 22 pages for four dollars, which ratios to eighteen cents a page. The average comic is 32 pages for four dollars, thirteen cents a page. I’m sympathetic to the needs of independent publishers. Diamond demands that you publish a specific amount of comics for their shelves and then they take a percentage of the profit. So, an indy publisher might get half of the cover price of their comic, but as a consumer you need to look out for yourself first. If Big City eventually publishes a trade that’s reasonably priced for the number of pages maybe I’ll get to try it out.
If you’re looking for cents per page value you can’t beat DC Comics. They publish multiple titles, all their big name characters, 32 pages for three dollars, nine cents a page. The problem I have with DC is that if you want to keep current with any of those titles you have to buy two issues a month. That means that you’re actually spending six dollars a month to read Wonder Woman, instead of four like from every other comic publisher. Even then, 64 pages a month for six dollars is actually still a deal. A quick short hand for comics is you should be getting eight pages per dollar, which means DC is knocking two dollars off the cover for what could be an eight dollar comic if they printed the same material in a single issue. To DC Comics: please do not start charging four dollars per issue just because I mentioned this. This is the best thing you’re doing for the industry right now, don’t mess it up.
It’s Marvel’s shenanigans, because I don’t want to use another word, which inspired me to write this in the first place. Their kids comics are three dollars, but those are a joke because all of them are just screen shots from their animated cartoons with word bubbles. All their on-goings are four dollars, unless it’s five or six or ten dollars that month for whatever dumb reason. And here’s the thing that really gets to me, which I just figured out when prepping for this article. When Marvel lists the number of pages in Previews that includes the cover pages, so every comic is two pages shorter then they advertise. How do they justify that? Easy, because Marvel ‘self covers’, which means that they use the same paper stock for their covers that they use for the interiors. That means that technically the comic is 32 or 40 pages, they’re just selling you a coverless comic, which last time I read my Overstreet guide means that the comic is basically worthless.
So the next time you’re looking to drop a comic and Marvel has decided for you that your regularly four dollar comic is now five or six or ten dollars that month. Don’t buy it and make sure that you tell Marvel that you dropped that book and why. I have a friend who is a fan of Mark Waid and was interested in getting Marvel’s new Champions book, but choose not to after they priced the first issue at five dollars and if he isn’t going to buy the first issue he’s not going to buy the rest. I may follow his lead the next time Marvel thinks they can justify five dollars or more for a comic.
