American comic book prices

Gary Leach bangfish at cableone.net
Sun Jun 13 22:10:19 CEST 2004


Myth: The American comic book was 64-pages, all-in-color-for-a-dime for 
generations.

Fact: From the mid-1930s into the early 1960s the standard American 
comic book cover price was - with few exceptions - a dime. However, the 
page count had shrunk from 64 to 32 interior pages, along with some 
shrinking of the physical dimensions and the inclusion by many 
publishers of outside ads and in-house promotions. In effect, the price 
of an American comic book more than doubled in this period.

The early 1960s then saw the cover price of the standard American comic 
book - now fixed at 32 interior pages - go to twelve cents. In the late 
1960s that price took another jump, to fifteen cents. By 1972 the cover 
price had reached twenty cents. This became a veritable trend, and 
through the 1970s the cover price hiked up fairly regularly by 
five-cent increments until it hit fifty cents in 1980 -  a specific 
move by DC that was eventually emulated by all other publishers. So, in 
roughly the same span of time it took comics to go from 64 to 32 pages 
for a dime, a book of 32 pages had gone from a dime to fifty cents - or 
five dimes. Did the American comic book reader get anything for this 
quintupling of cover price? Not really - even the resultant 
establishment of from 20 to 22 pages of story per book was only the 
restoration of the page count that stood from the 1960s through the 
early 1970s, but had shrunk to 17 by the late 1970s. (I speak 
specifically of the pages counts of the super-hero books issued by DC 
and Marvel, which by that time overwhelmingly dominated the American 
comics market.)

This second period was my time of suffering over price increases.  From 
a dime to twelve cents was a twenty-percent price hike, from twelve to 
fifteen a twenty-five percent price hike, from fifteen to twenty a 
thirty-three (and a third) percent price hike! A doubling of cover 
price by these ghastly proportional increments in less than a decade! 
This was bad, foks, this was very, very bad...and just kept getting 
worse, as it only took the following eight years to more than double 
again!

And this was back when I didn't understand all the reasons for price 
increases, be they sound or stupid, or that whether a reason was sound 
or stupid had little bearing on its contribution to what would always 
prove inevitable.

The upshot is, three dollars (rounding off today's range) is a 
ridiculous price to pay for a comic book - but not one whit more 
ridiculous that it was to pay fifty cents back in 1980, or seventy-five 
cents in 1986, or ninety-five cents in 1989, or a buck-fifty by 1993, 
or a buck-ninety-five by 1995. The truth is, it's been almost ten years 
since the nearly two-dollar comic reared its ugly head, but in that 
time the cover price has only increased by half - one of the lowest 
rates of increase since the early 1960s!

Yeah, it takes an old codger like me to go on like this, but that's the 
perspective an old codger like me acquires. I'll certainly reflect 
fondly back on "The Good Old Days," but that sort of thing is always 
leavened by reviewing things like this on occasion and amending that 
reflection to "The Good Old Days - They Were Terrible!"

Gary




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