$4.99 comics

"Insane" is a very good word for it, as are "disturbing", "disgusting", "deplorable", and "criminal". $4.00 is a totally absurd price that has no place anywhere near a single issue, so you can imagine what $5.00 does to my blood pressure. It's an obscene amount to ask for a comic book, regardless of whether it's a "giant sized" or "double sized" or fucking "anniversary" or an annual or special event or anything else. I have nothing but bile and fury when it comes to this discussion, and that's not likely to ever change. I understand price increases; that's always happened. But it used to happen .10, .15, .25, or (more recently) .50 cents at a time. I can see a book going from $3 to $3.50. I can see a book going from $3.50 to $4 (though as i've mentioned well-more than once, that, too, is way too much). But I can't get over the bald-faced price-gouging crass capitalist philosophy behind jumping a book a whole dollar in one swoop, as we've seen from both the Big Two over and over again in the last couple of years. Batman started the New 52 at $3; before Snyder and Capullo "went to bat" for us in October, it'd been jumped all the way to $5. Kelly Sue's Captain Marvel was seemingly 'cancelled' the first time around so they could reboot it a few months later at a full-dollar increase. It says nothing more or less than "We, Marvel and DC comics, do not care about you, sirs and madames. We think you are assholes, and so we're treating you as such. You are nothing to us; you aren't real people, your business and loyalty and life and feelings aren't important to us. You are no more than an ATM machine to us, and we will run the calculations and take you for every little fucking bit that we can until you're fed up, and then we'll ask for more. Furthermore, we are not scared of Image Comics, or Dark Horse, or any of the rest, who generally have held lower price points for their books, nor do we want or care about earning/winning-over new customers from the non-comic-buying population, NOR do we give a fraction of a shit about kids, at all.  Fuck kids, they don't have any money; clearly comicbooks are not for them.  We're too big to fail, and no amount of bad press or ill-will in the marketplace can dent our oligarchy. Go fuck yourselves; sincerely, Your Corporate Overlords at The Big Two."

And I think you're not the only one that's considering alternate ways to spend that money; I'm reasonably confident that the endgame of this sort of pricing is that people who are regular, dependable, weekly customers will start to spend their money in other ways (even in-medium: trades, digital, the generally cheaper books from the indies), the core of the comic buying public will see attrition the longer this goes without very vocal dissent, and the most vocal we can be (besides complaining online and at cons, making sure this is a living conversation with the writers, artists, colorists, editors, and such), is how we vote with our dollar.

Maybe i'm just a cheap skate but i refuse to pay that much for a 20 or 30 page book.A lot of times i even have a problem with four dollar(or euro's in my case)books, let alone five.And when i do start thinking about buying a book for that price i immediately realize that i could also buy two, three or four books for that price, maybe they're not the newest ones but i don't care, but that's just me.

So true man. I wish there was some thing we can do about this. Unfortunately though I'm also part of the problem, i just picked up the batman annual the other day.

UPDATE: I love Gerry Dugans work but I just dumped Nova. I am officially done paying exobidant prices for these books. If I'm going to pay a bunch of money for a comic book it better be written by Roy Thomas and drawn by John Buscema.

But what sucks is Batman Annual #3 was an awesome issue. So i feel guilty complaining about a book that I really dug. 

Do you seriously not see the difference between a creator trying to make ends meet and get fair recompense for their time by charging that for their book at a con, and the executives of multi-billion-dollar corporations raising the price of their ongoings to untenable levels, thereby contracting the comic-buying population and pushing potential readers away from the medium?

Tony,

A book that I was a-lookin' forward to has just entered the "No-Buy Zone". 

However, who'd want to bet against this book being in the Top Thirty for the month? Despite so many complaints about weekly books, double shipping, interlocking titles, and "event fatigue", the books that emblemize those categories are routinely the best sellers. As we cannot be sure of the corporate structure at The Big Two as to how much control Disney or Warner Bros. has over the day-to-day decision-making process, the blame falls everywhere at their end, but also on us as the consumer to a certain extent, as far too many of us can't kick the habit of certain titles and characters.

"You guys want Batman? We'll give you 13 Bat-titles a month!"; "We know you loved that Avengers movie--how about 5 extra comics you might like...plus some solo books...and we'll make them all an EVENT!"; maybe not actual quotes from some marketing executive, but it's sadly the way of things, and as the sales figures support this strategy (at least in the short term), they'll both continue to roll out the big guns. We've joked around about how I've cursed certain books by recommending them, but over the past three years, how many odd-ball titles or books featuring "B" heroes have come-and-gone? Virtually all the second-tier New 52 books or their replacements were cancelled, and at Marvel, despite strong beginnings for things like Elektra, Nightcrawler, X-Factor, or She-Hulk, the sales fall away and the books disappear. In some cases they might have been bad choices for leads, or simply under-whelming comics, but I'm convinced that our dollars are so concentrated on the core titles that more adventurous series can't get a foothold against the avalanche of "major" books.

Corporate marketing is going to chase the consumer dollar, so as readers continue to buy into the "must-have" frenzy over the top-loaded rosters of books, their short-sighted strategies seem to be paying off, although long-term it will probably bite them in the tucchus. As long as we remain addicted, they'll pump out what we're demonstrating we want through our purchases until the whole sales pyramid topples over, as the base is way too small to support it. At the indies, their smaller sales figures are seemingly keeping them in the black, but excepting the brand-name power of Image and Archie (and perhaps IDW and Boom/Archaia), I'd think they were all fairly vulnerable to a downturn in the industry caused by problems at The Big Two that would more likely drive readers old and new not to these smaller books, but out of the hobby entirely.

(Sammie may have hit upon something in mentioning The Big Two wanting us to think about digital; it would certainly raise profit margins, but at what price, ultimately, and by that I mean both per-book and to the industry. On the video side of things, Warner Brothers has virtually stopped pressing older, classic films on DVD/Blu-ray discs, opting for made-on-demand DVD-R discs, and they've added a by-subscription streaming feature to their Warner Archive site, which may pre-sage a "Warner Archive" premium cable channel, with the other studios following suit. Now, those decisions helped to destroy the retail consumer market for DVD sales as the films are no longer available in most retail outlets, but their per-film profit is certainly higher, having eliminated every middle-man possible between their vaults and the film buff, and they can create cyclical purchases through those subscriptions. They are now also free to charge whatever the market will bear, as consumer options have become much more limited...as has the audience, sadly. You'd hope that "mass-market media" companies might remember when they were, in fact, selling to mass markets, but that's probably asking for too much. With the Marvel Unlimited model in play, I don't think it's too far ahead of us that DC will have their own version.)