I never thought I would do it, but I find myself reading torrented comics more and more, as "collecting" comics doesn't seem as important to me as it did in my teen years.

I don't read comics anymore, but I do check the occasional graphic novel out of the library, they have a good selection and I'm in a somewhat rural area. Plus, I already have boxes and boxes of the ones I used to collect; if I bought more, where the hell would I put them? The library is turning out to be a tremendous resource as the cost of living increases.

I would like to see them forgo individual issues altogether. Finish a story arc and release it straight to trade paperback. $10 for six issues collected is a hell of a lot better than $4 per issue.

I too collected when I was a kid. I quite when prices reached 75 cents. NO WAY I would ever pay $4 for a comicbook....

quit... that is....

Why again can't we edited our posts mods?????

I just buy the collected graphic novels at this point. I simply can't afford to buy these issue by issue anymore.

I decided earlier today to cancel all of my subscriptions to floppies (single comics) and just wait for the trades.

Floppies, at best, are discounted minimally. HeavyInk.com, a great site, has 20% with free shipping, but they'll be charging for shipping soon. Why should I only get 20% and pay for shipping to read a fraction of a story when I can wait and read an entire story for 35% off and free shipping from Amazon?

The comic industry is pricing themselves out of existence. At least with the indie publishers I can rationalize that they don't have ads, but when Marvel pumps 1/3rd of the book with ads AND raises prices by 33%, that is just balls the size of grapefruits.

It's been a long time since I bought a new comic book. I usually purchase them second hand.

Sadly, I remember when comic books were under $2.00 per issue. I’m either dating myself or realizing a depressing truth about the industry.

@Belabras: Same. I love comics, but more and more I'm driven to borrowing them from friends or waiting until a TPB comes out.

Quesada destroying all I love didn't help much, either.

/bitter, bitter Marvel fangirl

For anyone here complaining about the cost of comic books:

Comic books aren't targeted to you.

Yes, you loved them as a kid. Yes, you probably still do.

And yes, you used to pay less than a dollar for them. Lots of other things also used to cost less than a dollar, remember? No? Probably because you weren't buying them. When you were buying comic books and baseball cards with your lawn-mowing/snow-shoveling money, Mom was buying the milk.

Now it's your turn to buy the milk, and let the kids with 100% expendable income buy the comic books.

Sorry.

To me, it's dumb. It's not so much that they're raising prices by 33%, but that they're raising it by a dollar. It's much more of a visual change, and a poor decision.

Were I them, I would have raised prices, at most, by 25 cents. 3.25... Then, later, if things are going well, price creep up. There's a reason the 'grocery shrink ray' works and a reason why price increases are generally small. If you take big leaps, people start to really rethink their purchases. Nickle and diming works because...it's nickles and dimes.

They may eventually go to graphic novels, at which point the actual comic stores will go out of business. They can't compete with barnes and noble for those.

Graphic novels would also be a poor decision for the companies, as you can't pump those full of lucrative ads. (Or, if you do, you better take the price from $15-20+ bucks to 5, like a bridal magazine..)

@AstroPig7:

You are a young one. I haven't bought a comic since the days they were less than a dollar.

@rellog: "Why again can't we edited our posts mods?????"

Eye assoome da staph hear lovs laffin ad or misteaks.

@Rob Weddle: The comics I read definitely are not targeted towards kids. Besides, every kid I know is saving their pennies for Halo 4.

@Diet-Orange-Soda:

The vast majority of the market for comics is over 18.

@Rob Weddle: I hate to burst your bubble, but the vast majority of Marvel and DC titles are *not* written for children. You must be talking about Archies or some other kiddie book. Most comics are geared to young adults and adults. The comic book industry would've already collapsed if it was targeting kids, because (the majority of) today's kids don't give a crap about books or comics, and would certainly sacrifice them for video games, computers, cell phones, and internet access. People over the age of 18 are keeping this industry alive.

When I was a kid my weekly allowance was based on the price of a comic book. When the price jumped 25%, I got a 25% raise in my allowance.

From 12 cents to 15 cents a week.

If they're now $3.99, that means that in 40 years the price of a comic book has increased by 2660%.

To put that in perspective, a Ford Mustang cost $2,368 back then. If the price had kept pace with comic books, a new Mustang today would cost $6,298,880.00 (plus license, tax, destination charges, and doc fee).

Maybe the car manufacturers should price on Marvel's model. They could each build 100 cars a year and still make a profit.

@Diet-Orange-Soda: Define kid. For these purposes I define it as anyone who still lives at home and has no major regular expenses. Teenagers can certainly cross into "mature audience" territory.

And when I refer to who is targeted, I refer strictly to who can spend the money, not the stories themselves.

@Diet-Orange-Soda: With the exception of the ridiculously fun Marvel Adventures titles, I would never let my more youthful family members pick up the titles I enjoy.

@dwasifar: Crap, I'm embarassed. Dropped a decimal point in there. $62,988.80 is the right number. Wish we could edit. :)

I hate the double dipping that goes on too. Release Secret Invasion #1. Then release several variant covers. Then release a "Director's Cut" of issue 1 with a few extra pages. And it isn't just Marvel. They released a "Director's Cut" of Kick Ass #1 too.

@Belabras: The GN's often show up at the library, too.

@gerrylum: yet somehow reading them is still important enough for you to illegally download them. I'm not judging.

I remember a few Image titles back in the day costing up to $3.99. They were kind of a rip but paper is a dying media. On the other hand, digital formats take away the whole reason I used to read and collect comic books. I liked owning the art.

@dwasifar: I'm guessing there will be a lot of people not buying comics OR mustangs in the coming months.

@DeanOfAllTrades: Of course you're not judging. I don't se how anyone could get that from your first sentence.

@suburbancowboy: Actually, Kick-Ass IS published by Marvel, under the Icon imprint.

And I really despise the variants and reprints as well. At this point there are at least 8 different versions of #1 of No Hero from Avatar Press out there...

@Rob Weddle: I don't understand your argument. People are complaining that the the cost of comics doesn't match their value. And your argument is that they're for kids anyway? So what it boils down to is that it's okay to overcharge kids because they're not buying milk?

I miss cheap newsprint pages. Count me among those who don't read Marvel comics anymore because of the cost.

And if they weren't targeted at me, why would they sell them next to the porno mags at my local convenience store.

That'll cut down on the money they are spending on their dates!

Although do dates on Second Life actually cost anything?

Quality is atrocious, too - I used to read comics in the 80s and early 90s, and recently downloaded a few new comics from demonoid. They were awful. Bad storytelling, bad art (too much Japanese animation influence), and, really, nothing new. Recycling the same old ideas over and over. But four bucks a comic isn't really out of line considering the shrinking market, increased costs, and the significantly better paper used today. Comics will start gouging the people who stay in the scene more and more, and eventually eat itself and die.

@AstroPig7:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles- 1.00 per issue.

Best 1.00 I ever spent as a child...

@catskyfire: The grocery shrink ray works because food is an essential, people have to eat. No we don't like it and we have already complained about it quite some on this website. Regardless of how the food producers try to manipulate us, we still have to eat. Therefore we will buy their products. Comics are not an essential, so if they raise prices we can simply quit buying and not feel many effects, unless you have an extreme addiction to comics.

I do agree however that they should raise the price in small increments, because when your looking at a dollar difference some people will quit buying comics or get the novels at the library (my library has a ton of them), very few people will continue to buy the individual issues.

I'm an adult and I can't afford comic books anymore, so how do they expect a kid to?

But then, as others here have pointed out, comics stopped being made for kids long ago. A couple years ago I decided to get rid of a bunch of comics and thought I would hand them out at Halloween (in addition to candy). As I sorted through them I realized there were very few I would feel comfortable giving to a child and said forget it.

I used to collect tons of comics every month until the price got to around $2.50 - $3. I realized at that time that in addition to being too expensive, they just weren't any fun to read anymore. I want to see Batman fighting a guy dressed like a clown, not fighting drug dealers or men who carve the number of murders they've committed into their skin.

Also, I realize the phone book-sized manga are in balck & white, but still, why is it possible to buy a 500 page Japanese comic for $6 - $8, while a slim 22 page American comic goes for $4? Something's not adding up here.

On the rare occasion I do buy a comic now, it's usually a trade paperback of older stories. New comics just don't appeal to me. When comics eventually die, I will miss what they were, not what they've become.

I have a number of comics on my wall that I paid .15 to .20 cents for. Selling comics was my 1st business as a kid (12 years old). The higher the price got the more I seen my business go down. I still buy them today but only off of Ebay and only here and there. At $4 a issues its a lot, but given the time it takes to read one. Not worth the cost to me.

You could also do a story on sport cards. Years go, I pulled a WG Sign SPX card. Booked at $2,000 I could not sell it for anything under $100. Today packs cost so much its not funny. Given that I just bought the cards I need and no longer packs. In long run I own all the 1/1s, 31 31/xxx of Guy Hebert (ok sue me) all for the cost of less then a box of cards today (Ok I spent about $500 on it) (I just won my last 31/xxx (there are only 42 numbered) Sunday))

I stopped collecting comics back in the eighties, when they hit sixty cents. I can't believe that they are eight times that for even less interesting, less colorful stories. Oh well, what can I say?

Excuse my terrible math, I meant almost seven times the price...

It's not cool to touch your comics anyway. Just like sports cards they have to be vacuum sealed with some inert gas and stored away for value later in life.

Yikes! I guess I will have to start cutting back too. I have a few titles I still get that I have been waiting to reach a milestone (typically issue #100) before I chop it. I guess DC will be raising their prices too?

@Trencher93: Absolutely dead on about the manga/anime influence and frankly it's annoying.

Here's a chart comparing the price of a comic to the rate of inflation: http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=18583

For roughly the same price (420 yen), Japanese consumers can buy black and white trade collections of their favorite manga series. These typically have 120+ pages or so of content (ad-free). So that's basically 5x the content for the same price as a single American comic book.

I collected US comics throughout junior high and high school, but switched to manga as soon as I could read Japanese. Just a better entertainment investment.

Sounds like the comics industry needs to move to a digital download system. The Marvel digital comics plan is a nice start, but doesn't get you new issues. Has anyone tried it?

[www.marvel.com]

I for one used to buy comics but when I began to run out of space, quality plunged and prices went up; I moved on. I do however read comics via torrents (yeah judge away) and what I think is that more of the publishers should consider non-flash based avenues for selling their comics online.
Yes I know you can pay and read online but that just doesn't do it for me. Anyway the market shall dictate the changes that will go on but $3.99 is waaaaaaaaaaay too much to pay for a single comic.

@Rob Weddle: Just wanted to make one more "you're so f'ing out of touch" comment for you, Rob.

In addition to what has already been said about many comics not really being geared towards kids, I'd argue that you're 100% wrong simply because I *enjoy* reading comics, therefore I'm pretty sure I must be in the target readership.

That said, I've got a mortgage, bills, a baby, and so many other things that require my money that I can barely afford just one title a month. And what I do buy really doesn't seem worth $2.99, must less $3.99.

How much does an hour-long drama cost to d/l on iTunes or Amazon? $1.99 for a recent episode of 24 is one example. And I'm going to get way more entertainment for my money out of that than I am out of a 15-minute comic book read. And did you read the ending of Batman RIP? Jeez. That was the only book I've been buying and that right there is enough to ensure I take a sabbatical from buying comics.

Some comics have been $3.99 for a while now.

For those of you who would be interested in catching up on older comics from the past several years, here are two ways to go about acquiring them.
1. Like movies and music, you can find them on torrent sites.
2. You can search for them using Google. Look for .cbr and .cbz files.

Enjoy

I honestly had no idea comic books we're still being printed on a large scale, besides like Mad Magazine.

@redskull: Because the Japanese comics are imported reprints. Publishers like Tokyopop and Del Ray are just paying for the licensing rights and printing costs (along with marketing, storage, whatnot).

American companies, on the other hand, have to pay those costs on top of paying creators (which in some cases also includes health coverage and other benefits), staff and so on. Which gives us $3-4 comics and why trade paperbacks and graphic novels end up usually being cheaper when released.

@ThickSkinned: Yuck. Just like books, movies, music, and video games, I want nothing to do with a movement towards digital distribution. "Oh hey, let me sit in my big comfy reading chair with my brand new .cbz file."

They started slashing their own throat many moons ago when they to direct market instead of having comics placed at just about every store under the sun...The set their readership at a certain level to never grow again...if you only aim your work at current readers, where do the new ones come from?

They then stopped writing all ages comics...because ultraviolence and cussing is KEWL and so much more mature.

The best stuff being produced today is the Marvel Adventures line and it is aimed at all ages and available in 7-11...what a concept!

I have heard the argument about "Kids don't read!" and I call BS, the 10-16 market is THE powerhouse market segment in the world of Book publishing...

The audience for well written Comicbooks should be self-renewing as the kids who read it grow out of it the new kids grow into it, and the adults who GET what superheros are supposed to be about will stick around while the self-indulgent FANBOYS can go collect dolls.

D-