I found this neat device online called The Inflation Adjuster. Put in a monetary value, select a year, and it will tell you what that would be in 2009 dollars. So I thought I would try the price of a comic book in 1960. One dime. The answer that came back in 2009 dollars stunned me. Seventy Two big ones! Pennies, that is.
That's right. Comics adjusted for inflation should be about 72 cents. Obviously, they're more than that. About five and a half times more than that (given the $3.99 price the industry has been pushing us towards). Are there reasons for comics to have increased so dramatically above inflation? I'm sure there are, some of them good, some of them not so good. I don't want to get into an argument over that. What's indisputable is the fact that it takes a larger ratio of disposable income to keep up the habit than it did a generation or two ago.
There are many suggestions to assist the long time survival of the comic book industry. Graphic novels and compilations have been fairly successful. They have helped penetrate the bookstore market. Magazine level items like Spider-Man Magazine or Shonen Jump can be found in Wal-Mart and some grocery stores. The Internet is awash with experimentation, some promising, some pretty gruesome.
But, like the melting glaciers are being dwindled by global warming, the mother source is starting to dry up. The comic shop and the weekly/monthly habit is dying. The connection to younger readers is almost non-existent. The last list of sales I saw had zero comics with sales over 100,000.
Maybe there is no hope. Maybe we just let the mothersource die, and pray that what's left is sufficient. Before we all pack it in and consign weekly comic buying to the scrapheap with radio dramas and pulp magazines, I have one last suggestion.
They key is in the habit and the stack. For me, there was nothing like going to a comic store and coming home with a great big stack. In the 70s, ten bucks would buy me as many as twenty new books. Now, ten bucks would get me two, maybe three max. People want to be social, they want to share. all our technology has not eliminated shopping and personal contact. We need them to want to come to the store weekly. We want them to buy a satisfying stack!
So here's my suggestion. One or both of the big two need to start a line of weekly comics, priced no more than $1.99 and maybe even $1.49. They can be smaller than the standard book, 24 pages or even 16. They can contain 10 to 16 pages of story, depending on the cost analysis of the publishers. They should have four to eight weekly titles, with stories that make you want to get the next issue. If they could publish three full-size issues of The Amazing spider-Man every month, I don't see why they couldn't do this in these smaller sizes every week.
DC could have titles that focus on their cities, such as Metropolis starring Superman, or Gotham starring Batman. Marvel's could be organized around teams such as The Avengers and X-Men, or those great titles that they used to have, such as Strange Tales and Tales to Astonish. Some or all should be all ages to help attract younger readers.
On a periodic basis, be it monthly, bi-monthly or even quarterly, these titles could be sold in a magazine or graphic novel as collections. Some readers will want to follow weekly. Other may prefer the periodic collections.
Yes, I know this idea may be met by resistance from those in the know. There may be myriad production problems. I don't know. I'm just a reader who's been in love with comics for a half a century. And I thought I would give my suggestion one shot. Maybe, just maybe, I won't have to take out my comics to my grandchildren and great-grandchildren and say, "Do you see? Do you see what we used to have?"
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