| Posted: 09 February 2010 at 8:26am | IP Logged | 9
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Price increases have actually slowed over the more recent time spans.++ Percentage increase doesn't seem like a particularly useful way to compare price history. It stands to reason that as the base price of a product gets higher, the percentage increase will tend to be less each time the price is raised. We also have to remember that the relatively rapid rate of price inflation in the 70's and early 80's was itself a correction of the fact that comics had gone 30+ years with almost no price increases. To some degree the prices shot up fast because they were catching up with everything else. •• There's no "to some extent" about it. Back in the Forties and Fifties, as magazine prices started to rise, due largely to increasing paper and production costs, comicbook publishers made what can be seen in the clarity of hindsight as a very foolish decision. They decided to keep comics "cheap", retaining the 10¢ cover price for as long as they could. This was an odd decision, when it is placed in context, since, at ten cents per issue for 64 pages, comics were no "cheaper" than most other periodicals. Weekly news magazines like TIME, for instance, cost a dime. Having made the decision, however, the publishers faced a dilemma. There was no way to keep the price low while continuing to put out the same product. Comics began to shrink, dropping their page count. Since magazines are printed in 16 page "signatures" (64 pages = 4 signatures) the cuts tended to be large. By the time I started reading comics, they were still 10¢, but they were 32 pages, 2 signatures. This presented a problem, since half signatures were costly, and a 16 page comic would be barely more than a pamphlet. So the publishers started playing with editorial page count. By time I joined Marvel, the number of actual pages of comics in a comic had dropped to 18, and the very next month it dropped to 17. This meant that almost HALF the comic was advertising. (Drop a Marvel or DC comic from that period on the floor, and it will almost certainly fall open to an ad.) Plus, the point had long since been passed where it was possible to keep the cover price at ten cents, so the price had started to go up. (The month I started on UNCANNY X-MEN the price was bumped from 30 to 35¢. This was done across the board, and across the board sales dropped. Except, it was noted, X-MEN sales stayed the same. So, the price increase had not cost us any readers. Compared to most other titles, our sales had "gone up".) As the prices continued to rise, Marvel eventually decided to bite the bullet and boost the editorial page count back to 22. At the time, one of my editors predicted it would soon start dropping again. but here we are, thirty years later, and while the prices have continued to rise, the page count has stayed the same. What this means, basically, is that to get a sense of how much the prices are rising, it's probably best to count from when the pages went back to 22, since the package size has remained fairly consistent since then.
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