There are many things I wish I hadn't read.

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Same here , Bill. I wish I hadn't read Infinite Crisis and One More Day.

It's one of the things that makes it very hard for me to swallow the complaints about the "high price", when readers are buying paper thin stories spread over a dozen issues. If they want to complain about something, let them complain about that! Stan Lee and Jack Kirby gave us the original Galactus "trilogy" for 36¢! Let's see today's wunderkind match that!

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Those paper thin stories spread out for so long are certainly what's driven me away from spending money on new monthlies. Marvel and DC have made it very hard to just be a casual reader, which is what I would be today if I were buying new comics. I have a full-time job, a wife, a house, a writing career that I'm trying to get going further, movies I haven't seen, books I haven't read, and all sorts of other things I want to get around to doing. MAYBE if it was still possible to have a cover catch my eye and buy the comic book to find an understandable and complete story inside, I might still buy an occasional issue just as I occasionally go to the movies, but I can't and won't make the ridiculous commitment that it seems to take to actually follow current comics. That's the biggest problem with comics now, I think. One can't just be a casual reader. The publishers have made that impossible.    

The minimum wage statistic is from the Department of Labor.

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Now compare 10¢ to the minimum wage in 1938, when ACTION COMICS 1 appeared. The hourly minimum, set for the first time that year, was 25¢.

Current comic prices suddenly seem less exorbitant, don't they?

Discussions of the price of comics brings all kinds of points to mind. Over the years, I have been asked to explain why the ESSENTIALS have to be in black and white, for instance. Why can't they be in COLOR? When I ask how many would be willing to pay double the price for color, there are usually few takers.

Ditto those who complain about the number of ads. Would they be willing to pay more for less? Nope.

The Federal minimum wage started in 1938 and was $0.25 per hour. So your 64 page colour comic book was 40 percent of your hourly minimum wage.

To do a proper comparison, we should do it based on pages (i.e. you need at least two comic books today to equal 64 pages of content). So what took half an hour of your time to earn the purchase price in 1938 would take more than an hour to earn the purchase price today.

Here's minimum wage history if anyone is interested:

http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/anth484/minwage.html

Very interesting indeed on the relationship between comic price and minimum wage.  Now, if only we could see the change in margin of a comic over the years. I would be curious of how much of that 12 cents went to profit and how much of that $3.99 goes to profit.

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Now it gets complicated. To sell 300,000 copies of that 12¢ comic, the publishers had to print around 600,000. Half of their paper and printing costs, in other words, were automatically in the red. Today, with the DSM, they print only as many as are ordered (sometimes less, but let's not go there!), so the profit margin is higher. Unfortunately, they sell about 10% of the number of copies that were sold of that 12¢ item, so it's a higher profit margin on a much, much smaller gross.