COMICS AND THE CURRENT ECONOMY

Comics, like everything else are being affected by the economy. Rising costs, and somewhat declining sales as people try to hang onto their cash have driven the average cost of our little goodies, up. But there has been two different approaches by the two leads in the industry. Marvel has raised the price of some of their comics as much as a dollar to make up for the afore mentioned cost and sales issues. Some, I say but not all. Their thinking revolves around charging more for lesser selling books in order to recoup production costs and keeping the book on the market, while books that sell well will retain the current average price because their sales still make them profitable. However, you aint gettin' any more bang for your buck. Same page count and more money being shelled out of your pockets, which in my opinion isn't exactly fair. DC on the other hand has tried something different. They've added 8 more pages of story content in the form of new "back-up" features, which they snarkily refer to as "co-features." Hey DC, a back-up is a back-up. So, for the extra dollar you get more, but the question is, do you really want it? TEEN TITANS has Ravager, DETECTIVE COMICS has the Question, ACTION COMICS has Captain Atom, STREETS OF GOTHAM has Manhunter... and we fans may have to pay that extra buck for these features that we don't really want to read anyway. Seriously, I don't want to have to spend that extra cash on stuff which I'm not interestested in getting. I mean, there's a reason these back-up characters are relegated to that back-up status; the interest in them isn't really there. Look, I can't claim to have solutions here, but to me, I want to buy a book with a main title and have it be just that, and not buy anthology series, which traditionally haven't done well in decades anyway. The economy may be turning around soon, so Marvel and DC- GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER and really think about how not to rip off fans. Your charging extra money for comics will only further decline sales as people have to cut back more. It's really simple economics.