to bring down the cost of the comics, why couldn't we go back to newsprint?

wouldn't kids go for a cheaper individual comic than pay for a glossy bulky and more expensive one?  those allowances have got to go a long way!

I have made this suggestion before, but I thought it made more sense to make these quarterly books that include 3 issues of a single book, and stagger the releases so that Spider-Man comes out one month, X-Men the next, Fantastic Four the next, and so on.

Between each issue, editorial could create articles about movies and video games starring the Marvel characters, along with "DVD extras" like sketches, scripts, interviews, etc, and maybe even short lifestyle articles about music, fashion, sports, whatever. Include previews of the other 3-issue anthologies and previews of TPBs at the back of the book, and use it as a loss leader to get people excited about buying comics.

I guess I fear change - I just want quality comic books delivered to me on time.

I'm too cynical to think that changing the physical size of a comic book would deliver, since formatting forces none of those two attributes.

For everyone that thinks this won't work, look at what is published outside of America.

In Japan, there is Jump magazine, it's what, 200 ish pages of comic, and it's these strips being collected in the manga books you find in stores these days.

Here in the UK there used to be a thriving anthology comic market.  Now it seems to be picking up again. 2000ad and the Judge Dredd Megazine are still going strong.  Panini are publishing reprints of fairly recent Marvel Universe and Ultimate universe books in the kind of sizes Matt mentions.  And these are all available in newsagents.

The rest of the world seems to have no problem with this kind of publishing, maybe the American market is mired in the nostalgia factor, I don't know.

Howard wrote: ...I like the idea, but I could have sworn it was tried before... back in the 90's?...

It's never been tried in the manner I suggested, which is that there would only be the magazine-sized comics, both at the newsstand and direct sales. The modern comic as we know it would be gone in favor of the new format. To make the plan work it has to be done totally and completely.

Roger beat me to the point I was going to address.

While anthologies have always had that potential for having to buy something you don't like in order to get something you do, it would seem that the more features and higher the price, the greater the opportunity for the purchase not to be of value to the reader.

Using the same Avengers/Captain America/Iron Man example:  For the sake of illustration, let's assume that my reaction to each of those series in the $8.99 anthology format is the same as it is right now.  Namely, I enjoy the Cap title, have always been indifferent to "armor guys" and require something special to really draw me to their stories, and couldn't be paid enough to bother with Avengers as it is.  In Matt's proposed format, I can drop nine bucks for the single, 22-page story I'm interested in (or, more likely, not...that doesn't seem like a good value to me). In the current format, I can drop three bucks on Cap, and the other six on two other titles that do entertain me.

Now, if the publishers were to offer the same sorts of savings for direct subscriptions that it seems most magazine publishers do (40-50% or more), then that may make for more of a per-unit value.  (The only magazines that we read regularly in the house are all direct subscriptions for this very reason...we find it much more economical to, up front, pay a lump sum that comes out to be about $1.50 per issue, instead of $4.99, or $2.75 instead of $7.99.)

"Using the same Avengers/Captain America/Iron Man example:  For the sake of illustration, let's assume that my reaction to each of those series in the $8.99 anthology format is the same as it is right now.  Namely, I enjoy the Cap title, have always been indifferent to "armor guys" and require something special to really draw me to their stories, and couldn't be paid enough to bother with Avengers as it is.  In Matt's proposed format, I can drop nine bucks for the single, 22-page story I'm interested in (or, more likely, not...that doesn't seem like a good value to me). In the current format, I can drop three bucks on Cap, and the other six on two other titles that do entertain me."

I think the resistance to the anthology format can be overcome in two ways.

1.  Multiple shorter features.  Instead of three 22 page stories, have five 15 pagers or something like that.

2.  Lower the cover price by increasing the ad count.  32 page comics have 10 pages of ads, and it's the same 10 pages in every comic.  I believe the ad-to-content ratio for magazines in 50/50.  66 pages of comics + 60 pages of ads = 126 page magazine with 6 times the number of actual ad pages as 3 comics.  Even charging less per ad, you would hopefully earn enough to drop the price of the anthology to 4 to 6 bucks an issue.

Mike