BAD NEWS FOR FUNNYBOOKS

For the first time since March of 2009 no comic sold more than 100,000 copies in August. Saith ICv2.com: “There was no equivalent for July’s X-Men No. 1, which, supported by numerous incentive covers and a heavy marketing push that included launch parties, sold over 140,000 copies. Issue #2, which had considerably less marketing help, sold just over half as many copies, a steep drop even for a second issue. Seventeen titles in the top 25 sold fewer copies than their previous issues, with just six showing increases in circulation.”

Douglas Wolk at techland.com reports on a recent discouraging visit to his comics shop: "It's these four-dollar comics," my dealer sighed as he flipped through my stack at the register. "The more there are of them, the worse we do."

When Wolk expressed amazement — “If the price of a standard comic book climbed from $3 to $4 over the past year or so, that means you're making a third more on each sale, right?” — the dealer explained: "On each comic, yes, but our customers are still each spending about the same total, or even less. Three dollars for a comic might be worth it, four dollars might not, and it's not like there's a boom that means they've got more money to spend."

Which led Wolk into a thicket of economic speculation: “The standard rule of periodical comics sales, as I understand — and this is entirely anecdotal, and corrections to it are very welcome — is that the typical fan who visits a comics store once a week likes to spend roughly twenty dollars a week on comic books. There's something that's psychologically ‘safe’ about that figure: it's not too much money, and for a long time it's been enough to guarantee a pleasant evening of reading. Twenty years ago, the price of a new mainstream comic book was 75 cents, about to make the leap to a dollar, the same percentage they're currently increasing. For a $20 bill, you could get a stack of a couple dozen titles, with some interesting indie experiments thrown in.

“Since then,” Wolk goes on, “the price of comics has zoomed far ahead of the cost of living: $20 in 1990 is the equivalent of a bit over $33 now, while new mainstream comic books have more than quadrupled in price. And what happens when comics abruptly increase their cover prices by a third while adding little or no extra content — and the $20 standard gets you all of five 22-page comic books that take a few minutes apiece to read — is that that value proposition gets a lot less enticing.

“Do sales immediately plummet when prices go up?” he continued. “No; serial comics sales never collapse abruptly unless the product itself drastically changes. They dribble away. In practice, readers quit following particular titles in disgust much less often than they gradually find it not worthwhile to pick them up any more. $4 cover prices don't seem to have tanked any formerly-$3 titles yet, and maybe they're making a little more money in the short term. But look at the monthly sales charts: the slow dribble of sales away from midline titles keeps dribbling, the top-of-the-line sales are nowhere near what they were a few years ago, and the customer base for mainstream comic books is not exactly increasing.”

Wolk concludes that comic book publishers maybe ought to reconsider the value propositions — “ways of publishing new material that are irresistibly inexpensive.”