Marvel is raising its prices again, sending paroxysms of apoplexy throughout the small segment of the world that even knows Marvel Comics exists.
Now, I remember all too well the shock I felt when comics first went from 20 to 25 cents. What an insult, what a slap in the face! Now, I'll only be able to buy 4 instead of five books with a dollar--and I only have two dollars, so I can only buy 8 comics, Holy mother of God--!
Ah, we didn't know how good we had it. I mean, in the late 60s and early 70s, comics were actually a bargain. Not because they were so cheap, which they were, but because so much good stuff was available so cheap. All those Silver Age books you may have never read or owned, such wonders as the Kree-Skrull War or Conan the Barbarian # 1, the O'Neil-Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow run, any one of those issues you could have bought for a quarter and gotten change.
The vast majority of the books I see on the stands today appeal to me not at all. It's a supreme irony to me that now that I am in my mid-30s and able to afford all (well, most) of the comics that I want, there is so very little being released that captures my attention and keeps me coming back month after month.
So few, y'know, stories. So few, y'know, artists who can tell a story. The industry is only beginning to recover from the deification of crap by Image and its sympathizers and imitators of the last decade or so.
So, this price increase. The average Marvel or DC title now, I guess, will run you 2.50. Over ten times what they cost when I first started buying comics. Has the entertainment value increased ten-fold? What do you think?
Sure, there was plenty of crap being published when comics were a quarter or so. DC and Marvel especially have for decades published dozens of titles of mediocre to poor quality in the apparent name of taking up space so smaller publishers can't get their (possibly superior) product to readers.
But, all those years ago, we bought those second and third-rate titles because, well, what else was there to spend the money on? For the true comics fan, comic books were unlike any other medium back then and had little competition outside its own insular universe. "Hmm, I've already read the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man...What the hell, gimme that Luke Cage and oh, yeah, toss in a Defenders too."
Today, comics fans who can't find a good read can turn to the Internet, video games, and role-playing card games to find thrills that, while different, seem to fire a lot of the same neurons that turn on comics fans. Entertainment is much more ubiquitous today then it was in the 1970s, when TV, movies and comics were pretty much the only choices, and access to all of them was limited in one way or another. If you wanted to see a movie you needed money and had to go to the movie theater. If you wanted to watch TV, you were at the mercy of a small number of stations, and if you wanted to watch a particular show you had to watch it when it was on. That is, if the rabbit ears were working. (If you don't know what rabbit ears were, don't tell me about it, I know I'm too old and don't need you to remind me. I have my kids for that. In the words of my then-5 year old daughter last year, "Daddy, you're old and I'm new." Thanks, Kira.)
Hell, even in the unlikely event you chose comics for your entertainment, you were at the mercy of a distribution system seemingly designed by monkeys, evil monkeys at that, and also had to bip-bop around to numerous drugstores, 7-11s and newspaper shops to make sure you had every issue of your favourite titles.
At the risk of really sounding old, comics readers today have no idea how good they have it. It's not hard at all to find most titles, and even the most bizarre, offbeat titles can be accessed either through mail-order or online if you don't have a comics shop nearby.
The fact of the matter is, here in the alleged New Millennium, entertainment, like Elvis, is everywhere. You can barely step out of your front door without someone offering you 250 hours of free Internet access, 12 CDs for a penny, 6 books for a buck, you name it. They want to entertain you, and they'll do whatever they have to to suck you in.
Except comics, of course. When's the last time a mainstream publisher offered anything free? Yeah, DC offered a free Batman Beyond comic last year, but how many of you knew that? How many of you ever saw it? I don't know about where you live, but I have 5 comics shops within 50 miles of my house, and frequent them all. I saw the BB freebie at precisely ONE store, and only there because I asked about it ahead of time and it was saved for me.
And even then, the frigging thing was given away in comics shops. I've been saying this a long time, but maybe you're hearing me say it for the first time: kids today are growing up without exposure to comic books, and this fact threatens the very existence of the artform.
Yes, my kids are growing up with comics. Most of their friends are not. Trust me, I've seen it. It's not that they're unaware of the characters, most all of them know Superman and Spider-Man. But when I tell them there are actual comics they can read, and then give them some, they are awestruck. Amazed. They don't even know they exist.
Look, it's not a difficult proposition: kids love comics. When they have them. When they're any good. When they're affordable. There's no one solution to the current decline in the industry, but Jesus, it's not that complex a formula either.
What am I proposing? Well, it's not my job to solve the problem, but since you asked...
I'd like to see thick, phonebook-type books, on cheap paper, sure, compiling 6-12 issues of comics that appeal to kids. I'm talking about reprinting the Batman Animated-inspired comics, the recent run of Avengers: United They Stand, and especially those Cartoon Network comics DC publishes that are too expensive in their current form for me to buy for my kids to destroy them within minutes. 2 bucks a pop? You gotta be kidding me!
Give me one of the jumbo, colouring-book size packages I just mentioned, preferably with durable covers, and I'll drop two bucks on it and toss it to my two little hooligans. Hell, I might even pay three bucks for it. I love comics, I love my kids. I want them to be exposed to the artform that has given me so much pleasure for so many years. But not at today's prices, not for the paltry value they're offering.
One of, if not the, best selling comics is Pokemon. It sells so well because it is massively promoted through the very existence of the cartoon and video games, and is marketed in toy stores, Wal Mart, Kmart, you name it. I've seen those damn 4-packs everywhere.
Marvel and DC have cartoon shows both on the air and in the works. They, and any company that wants to sustain the industry and develop a new generation of readers, need to produce quality promotional tools (i.e., TV shows, video games, whatever works) and then market them.
I've been in radio 15 years. I've seen lots of great ideas fail because no one wanted to spend 50 cents to promote their existence. Sure, it's great that we have some of the adult-oriented, entertaining, compelling titles we have today, but damn it, comics are an artform, and an artform that has less and less patrons every year. Until the companies all get together and standardize an affordable, appealing format and then fill it with compelling, exciting, quality comics, the artform will continue to die out. No one will be there to read the Sandman or The Authority of 2025 if there aren't affordable, appealing, younger-skewing titles now to make sure there are adults who can even read the language of comics 25 years from now.
So, while I was quite traumatized at 10 or so to see that price increase, at least I knew about it. Most kids would react to news that Marvel is raising prices by saying "Marvel Comics? What's that?"
Price increase? What price increase?