RE: Comics! #1 [Prices]

Welcome to the very first edition of RE: Comics! featuring the thoughts of myself and my friend and comic professional Gregg Schigiel! We wanted to dive right in during our first installment, so if you need to get caught up, please check out Living Wednesday to Wednesday #55. 

Stephen Mayer: I have a wicked discount at the store, so what made me start thinking about the rising price of comics was an article with Mark Waid in Comic Foundry, in which he pointed out that comics have outpaced inflation over the last 40 years by 400%. He then gave reference that if that were the case with movies, a ticket would cost $50.

Gregg Schigiel: I've heard that statistic, or something like it, in the past. I can't dispute it (I don't intend to). I do want to say, though, that I've not done the proper amount of research to really speak with authority here. I can only speak from my experience and observation with a healthy dose of assumptions/educated guess-timations (which I think is the case with a lot of us who talk about this stuff, though I've heard some speak very authoritatively without a lick of actual knowledge - I'm admitting here and now my lack of keen, researched, statistical know-how).

But speaking of the rising price of comics and why, much is made of the better paper, coloring, reproduction, and the rising cost of production that comics have today. I propose that what really drives the prices up is lack of advertising. And I'm talking about advertising WITHIN the comic...not advertising comics out in the world. The ads helps defray the costs of production. Advertising's about putting a product or message in front of as many eyeballs as possible. There aren't enough eyeballs looking at comics.

I remember when I was at Marvel we'd look at magazines...slick paper, glossy photos, lots of articles and content...and a TON of pages. And they'd sell for $2.95-$4.00...we're talking Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly (and that one was a weekly!)... The one thing these magazine also had: ads...and lot of them.

Now in terms of cost, I don't have the numbers to say, with confidence, that one comic is more expensive to produce than one magazine, but in the case of a Vanity Fair, I'd imagine Annie Leibovitz gets paid really well to photograph a cover...and name-your-beautiful-actress/actor gets paid equally well if not more so for said cover. And that's just the cover. And I know that, while I enjoy doing it, drawing comics, unless you're a contract guy with an outstanding page rate, does not pay relative to what, to my mind, it would pay in "the real world". By way of example, my starting page rate at Marvel is around the same as what folks get paid to draw a single image for a licensing style guide.

Naturally, the response here might be that yeah, sure, but the art done for licensing is used and re-used, it's seen by millions of people, etc, etc. Bingo. That's just the point. More people seeing a thing for sale means more opportunity to sell the thing for sale. Morse things sold makes an advertiser more likely to pay to advertise with that thing.

So yes, comics cost a bit to produce, but I'm not sure those costs are so prohibitive as to demand, as Mark Waid put it, a 400% outpacing of inflation.

So I think the real question might be, how do you get more advertisers, which gets us to how do you get more circulation, which gets into how do you bring in new/more readers and wider distribution. And that, my good man, becomes a HUGE can of worms. It's like a hydra, each head begets many more.

And, as corollary to that - and if I can continue to use mythical creatures as my metaphors - is the genie already out of the bottle? Does knowing that the hard-core comics buyer WILL pay $2.99 for 22 pages of content (21, really, in the case of those books with recap pages as page 1)...can you go back?

If an older sibling gets away with staying out 'til midnight...can a parent then tell a younger sibling, when they reach the same age, they have to be home by 10?

Is the monster loose and all this talk of the price of comics is just that, talk?

And that's one side of things...the supply-side, if you will. There's a whole other set of things going on on the consumer side.

You deal directly with consumers; do you notice people picking up a book, flipping through it, looking at the price and putting it down? When a publisher puts out a $.99 issue or something, does that give them a bump or move more product?

I have theories on that stuff (again, just theories), but you're there in the mix. So what do you notice on that sales/consumer side of the equation?

SM: I think you had two great points right out of the gate.

The better paper quality: DC raised the price on books with Baxter paper in the late 80s as part of their price differentiation plans, where books like the Big Three (Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman) were offered at lower prices than more obscure titles (Animal Man). Then you were paying the price for being the only person that liked a C List character (even if they were in the Justice League). I think that's the kind of logic that Marvel is now applying to a lot of $3.99 mini-series attached to Dark Reign (Hawkeye, Elektra, She-Hulk, New Avengers the Reunion).

Now that you say it, there really aren't ads like their used to be in comics. What is in
there doesn't sell a product directly (X-Ray glasses, buff up your body, mail order
comics) and you almost never see a two-page spread of ads with another full page after
it, warranting a "continued after next page" editor's note. I wonder if selling smaller
ads to more copies would be more appealing. From a retailer's perspective, I think more
comic shops could afford to advertise in comics if they were able to buy an eighth of a
page rather than the whole shebang, which only Midtown Comics seems able to do.

Without going too deeply into advertising/attracting a wider audience for comics, maybe we need to make the point for some of the readers that while Dark Knight becomes the highest grossing movie of all time and Alan Moore is guest-starring on the Simpsons, comics are still selling maybe a 10th of what they were in the early 90s. Amazing Spider-man #583 with all five of its printings and variants has got nothing on the Death of Superman or X-men #1. We're also not bringing in the collector's market demographics that we were back then.

As far as the licensing illustration goes, I suppose those same rules apply to Hollywood,
where it probably pays better to storyboard for animation or movies than it does to
pencil comics. Also I'm sure Mark Bagley is a bazillionaire now, not because of the
hundreds of Spider-man comics he's drawn, but because of all of the times those covers
were reused for lunch boxes and notebooks and underwear and t-shirts.

I can think of two recent examples where comic companies were able to roll back prices
for two different reasons. To continue your analogy, the older brother had to be home at 10, and the younger brother, when he got to be the same age, got to stay out until 12.

Boom Studios books were always $3.99, as far as I know since the company starters. Warhammer, creator-owned stuff, Farscape, Eureka, across the board. When they launched their Boom Kids line last month with Cars, the Incredibles, and the Muppet Show, all of those books were only $2.99. You can make the argument that it's a completely different line directed at a completely different audience, but I feel like the Incredibles covers said differently. You had four, inter-connecting covers by Mike Oeming, who's mostly known for mature books like Powers, Mice Templar, and Red Sonja, and a 1:25 variant by Hellboy's Mike Mignola. All of that screams that they're reaching out to their usual audience. And it worked, because a lot of people that never bought a Boom book got four covers of Incredibles and were opened to the possibilities that the copy offered at $3.99 when books like Irredeemable and today's Unthinkable came out. The cheaper entry-point made people aware of a company that had rested outside of the top 4 or 5 companies since its inception.

The other great experiment seemed to be Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith's Fell and Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba's Casanova, both from Image. The idea was to offer 18 story pages instead of 22 for only $1.99. This changed the storytelling into a more compact style, with 12 panel per page layouts a lot of the time (especially in fell), and what you missed in story pages was made up for with top notch letters pages and backmatter.

Yes and no as far as people outright bawking at prices. People seem very aware that New and Dark Avengers are now permanently $3.99 with no change in content, but they really don't bat an eye at it. Those two are still our highest selling titles at the store as
they seem to be nationwide. Now limited series, as I hinted at before, are a completely
different story. Some people will kick back specials and minis left and right, even if it
ties directly into a story that they're really excited about. People that bought the
twelve issues of Young Avengers, the Civil War: Young Avengers/Runaways and Secret
Invasion: Runaways/Young Avengers series at $2.99 are as I type passing on Dark Reign: Young Avengers at $3.99.

And for the second part of your question, people are really enjoying trying new things for low, low introductory prices. Air #6 from Vertigo was only $1.00 and came out the same day that the first trade paperback hit at $9.99 for a killer one-two punch. Buck Rogers #0 at 25 cents was a big hit. And today we've already sold out of Unwritten #1
(also from Vertigo) at $1.00.

It broke my heart when Marvel made Marvel Adventures Spider-man #50 was $3.99. We shouldn't be taking this fight to the kids. 

GS: You cover a lot of ground, so I'll try and be more concise on my end.

I believe the higher prices on minis and lower-tier books is in proportion to their circulation. The projected sales determine the price point. This, of course, may or may not keep said book as a lower tier book by virtue of its price.

Back to my seeming obsession with ads, part of the problem/trick for an advertiser or a media buyer is who are they reaching when they put an ad in a comic book? This is important, lest an advertiser spends money for nothing. And, and this is a major point of order to my mind, something I'll surely address many times over as we continue these exchanges: there's no data.

To sell a product effectively, you need data. Data comes from research and learning about the customer (their wants and needs, how they think and feel about your product, etc). With that information you can better deliver a product of message to those who might best receive that information. But without it we can say, “oh, there’s the internet and video games...” Yet, people bought and read those Harry Potter books like they were going out of style.

So who, REALLY, buys comics? It's easy to say "men, ages 25-45", but based on what? To my knowledge I'm unaware of there being that degree of market research...a way to understand the demographic and psychographic make-up of the buyers. With that information, you could then go to a potential advertiser and say: here's our data. We reach X number of people, monthly, and those people are A, B, and C.

I'm not saying ads are the be-all, end-all answer. But by extension, it's interesting to me that the market data doesn’t seem to exist. You tell me, Stephen, do the publishers ask you about the nature of your buyers and who's buying what, or is it "this book sold this many, this book sold this many"? Because I'd love to be wrong about this.

Off topic, but to correct an assumption: I'm pretty sure art taken from a comic and used  for licensing does not pay a royalty. There's a drawing I did of Electro that appears all over; I got paid for that once. So if Bagley did a series of drawings specifically for licensing, he got paid for those the one time (and probably not enough to make him a bazillionaire).

I wager the name recognition of The Incredibles and The Muppets did more to get Boom attention than charging a dollar less. As did Dark Horse by doing good licensed books early on...and still do.

But back to the price of comics. Why do you suspect the Image “slimline” books failed (and I say failed in that they’re no longer done and it didn’t become a trend)? Was it a failure of marketing? Was the content not broadly appealing enough? Was the cheaper price-point and physical FEEL of the fewer pages result in lower perceived value, despite it being merely 4 pages shorter and NOT having ads/filler?

Is it worth getting into the margins on comics? I mean, there's the cover price consumers pay a store...and then the price a retailer pays the distributor...and then there's the price the distributor pays the publisher. I can't remember the specific breakdown,s but in the end, for a $2.99 book, the publisher gets what, like $.60-$.75 or something? Correct me on that, please. But this, on a really basic level, is a part of this pricing equation, to be sure, just as much as production costs and outside/ad revenue streams. 

SM: I agree with the ratio of circulation to price. I also think it's interesting in the
chicken or egg scenario (are books more expensive cause they're aren't reaching as many people, or are they not reaching as many people because they're more expensive), that some creator-owned creators are handicapping themselves out the gate with higher prices, perhaps to make a little more off of what they assume will be lower circulation. It's my understanding that creators at companies like Image get to set their own price point, so when those books are on the shelves at $3.50 or $3.99, it's at the choice of the creator rather than at the mercy of the materials or content.

It is interesting that no one seems interested in market research in comics and no one
really seems to ask. I suppose I could put in a call to Jim McCann at Marvel's marketing
department, but I think they are probably more geared toward selling MORE to people that are already buying than selling ads to people interested in their research.

Once a year or so, Diamond will send us a survey with our shipment asking very broad questions about our customer base. Even at the Diamond Retailer Summits, which are supposed to be designed for retailers to communicate with one another and give feed back to publishers and supplies, it's about getting us to carry more product. Most real comments from retailers are kind of pushed to the side.

Sometime last year, Marvel tried to put a survey out in the field as inserts in their
comics that wouldn't require tearing the book to remove it and fill it out. Instantly
retailers began complaining about the added weight to ship the extra paper in the comics and customers complained that the books with the inserts in them bent easier. That was the end of that effort.

I think you had two separate situations with the aforementioned Image slimline books. On Fell, Warren Ellis has a built in audience from Transmetropolitan and Planetary that will buy whatever he does, be it $1.99 at Image or his $3.99 books like Doktor Sleepless and Anna Mercury that are coming from Avatar now. There I'm pretty sure that Ellis just got bored and stopped like he seemed to do with Desolation Jones at Wildstorm. Casanova on the other hand had two volumes with a third set to come out later this year. I think thetrippy-ness of that book and the use of only black, white, and one other tone setting color turned people off at a glance.

I've never been clear of what the margins are between the publisher and the distributor. I know that the margin between the retailer and distributor varies from company to company, depending on how much merchandise is offered.

Another good question though might be how discounts affect people's buying habits. Buying my comics down South, I've always heard that subscription discounts were a southern tradition that's become expected from one shop to another. Do they offer subscription discounts at stores in New York like Jim Hanley's, Midtown Comics, or Forbidden Planet?

GS: To say one more thing on the research/data front (for now, as I’m sure I’ll bring it up again): it seems to make a lot of sense for anyone - publisher, retailer, etc. - to understand the market as thoroughly as possible. I wish there was a greater focus on that.

I find the various examples of resistance you pointed out - retailers on the weight of shipping, consumers about books bending - very frustrating. It’s very much a “stuck in our ways” thing in an “adapt or die” world (fair or not, it’s the nature of the beast). Yes, comics have survived and likely will in some form, but it’s hard to say comics should be more popular or accepted or appreciated when within the industry there’s such resistance to “different”. And I’m not talking about “Brand New Day” or “Final Crisis” as much as formats, packages, business models, etc. I remember a book like Barry Windsor Smith’s STORYTELLER (late ‘90s) suffering because it was oversized and therefore didn’t quite rack well and couldn’t be bagged, boarded and boxed. Or when Marvel bought out Capital City, was it, and there was an uproar about ordering books from multiple distributors (though it’s been pointed out to me that that move really was pretty destructive, industry-wise). Should be interesting to see what happens with DC’s WEDNESDAY COMICS project.

And look, I can be pretty hard-headed and old fashioned myself, but sometimes hard-headed can also be wrong-headed.

And I'm not sure what to conclude about the Image Slimline experiment. I thought it was a great idea. As a matter of fact, in full disclosure, I pitched a series over at Image in that format. It didn’t fly. C'est la vie. I'm not as sure about creators setting their price on Image books. That’s part of the equation, but so is page count, color v. B/W, projected sales, etc.

I wish there were more stuff like those slimline books; I’d be more inclined to buy them, especially if the 18 pages were used effectively (which is to say, not so much of that decompressed storytelling; another topic for another time).

Now let's talk discounts!

I think I got 20 or 30% off at Superheroes Unlimited, which was my shop in South FL...and that was based not on a pull list, but on being week-to-week loyal. In college, at Cosmic Comics in Gainesville, FL, discounts were based on pull-lists; the number of pulled titles netted you a certain discount. So friends and I pooled our lists to get a 30% discount. All of this in Florida, following your theorized “Southern Tradition”.

In NYC, Midtown Comics and Cosmic Comics both have “customer loyalty” programs that amount to: spend $100, get a $20 credit, which ends up as a slightly less-than 20% discount. Jim Hanley’s, I’m not sure of. When I was working at Marvel I went there a lot because there was an arrangement at the time involving trade-ins that has since been done away with. Hanley’s also had a thing where if you did a signing there you’d get a 40% discount. Coincidentally, after I left Marvel that turned into “40% discount for 1 year”, and it turns out my year was up. With no discount, I switched stores and started going to Midtown. In other words: my buying is very much based on discounts, though I’ve not gone the internet subscription service route, where I know the discounts can be significant. I still need to flip through a book before buying it. Long gone are the days I buy a book solely because it’s a new issue of a series I’ve been buying and I want to keep a run going. For that matter I haven’t bagged or boarded a comic in probably 10 years...

With a steeper discount, I’m sure I would buy more. Though eventually the stack of unread comics and collections and books gets to where, for me, it becomes less about cost and more about: why buy something else when you’ve yet to read what you’ve got! I find it hard to buy even a relatively cheap Essential or Showcase volume when I know it’ll be ages before I get to read it, if at all.

Do you find your customers who get a discount are more inclined to buy new books or try things out or stick with a book they’re undecided on a bit longer?

Maybe that’s why people don’t bat an eyelash at $3.99 for Dark Avengers?

$3.99 for a standard comic book definitely makes me flinch. 

SM: As a last comment on the market research for now, I'm surprised that sites like
News-a-Rama and Comic Book Resources haven't pull more real polls out in the field to
judge demographics and buying habits instead of asking "who would play the best Green Lantern in a GL movie" yet again. Numbers like those would allow more relevant
extrapolations when it comes to regular articles like the Mayo Report market analysis.
Perhaps comics journalism should come up later.

I'm completely torn on the adaptation front, or what I like call the Analog Boy in a Digital World (from the RX Bandits song). I know it's necessary, I preach it, but when something comes along that looks to undercut the store, I usually buck against it. The best example of customers completely kicking back on something because of the size that I can see around the store is Mike Allred's Red Rocket 7. We have stacks of those LP sized issues sitting around, and the undersized trade paperback from earlier this year didn't go over well either.

Wednesday Comics should be incredibly interesting for this discussion. The first question
people asked was "How am I supposed to put that in a bag and board." I've heard people say that when it's finally collected, it should be in a giant, expensive hardcover like he Little Nemo in Slumberland books from Sunday Press. It's my understanding that it will be printed on newsprint, which comes in opposition to the idea that better materials have increased prices since it stills costs $3.99. I can only imagine that that much top talent working towards one goal comes at great expense and the format is less about price point and more about aesthetic.

Acme runs on a pull-list based discount bracket. 9 or less monthlies = no discount. 10-29
monthlies = 10% off new books, 15% off back issues and collections. 30-59 monthlies = 15% off new books, back issues, and collection. 60+ monthlies = 20% off across the board. I'm surprised that Hanley's doesn't take better care of visiting, or rather visited,
creators. We always hook our guests up in a HUGE way and then they're pretty much in for life.

I think people with a lower discount, translating as fewer subscription titles, are more
likely to try out something new regardless of the price-point. If someone has less than
10 monthly titles on their list, there's a good chance that if they still come in weekly,
at least once a month they won't have anything waiting for them. On those off weeks they don't want to leave empty handed and hit the shelves in search of their next favorite thing. 

GS: Well, again, I think it's clear that we're not finding solutions to this problem of prices, if indeed it's even a problem (and hopefully the very patient folks reading all this jibber-jabber understand that). I'd love for there to be a greater focus on a lot of these things, but there are a lot of factors, many of them uncharted and unmeasured, that make that very difficult.

WEDNESDAY COMICS should be very interesting, indeed. Even I wonder if I'll pickup the individual issues or wait to see if they call get collected OR if they'll get collected separately...I'll probably end up buying the issues though for two reason: Kyle Baker & Jose Louis Garcia-Lopez.

I'll stop typing now. I'm sure you've got things to do and I know I've got work to do...

Gregg Schigiel is a cartoonist, illustrator, and writer. He's worked as a penciller and editor for Marvel Comics and an illustrator and cartoonist at Nickelodeon in addition to creating his own characters and books. He currently makes delicious desserts in the New York area. Check out his website at Hatter Entertainment.com.

Stephen Mayer makes his mama proud pushing funny books and raising a surrogate grand-daughter for her in the form of a beautiful black Lab.