Price increase on a few DC books

[reideen1313]

Just FYI so you aren't shocked in June:

DC RAISES PRICES ON SIX DCU TITLES
Today DC Comics used their weekly email newsletter to retailers to serve notice that they have raised the prices on their last remaining DC Universe $2.25 titles. Beginning with their June issues, Batman, Nightwing, Robin, The Flash, JLA and Wonder Woman will arrive in stores with a new retail price of $2.50. Because they were solicited in both June and July with the previous cover price of $2.25, DC reported the affected issues will be announced as returnable at a later date.

The cover price change comes on the heels of Marvel’s elimination of their $2.25 price point on nine titles also beginning with issues on sale in June.

DC has not eliminated their $2.25 price point entirely, however. Their “Johnny DC” titles, including Justice League Unlimited, Batman Strikes and Teen Titans Go (among others) currently remain at $2.25.

Additionally, DC announced that 100 Bullets (with issue #62) and The Books of Magick: Life During Wartime, Fables, and Lucifer will have their price raised from $2.50 to $2.75, the latter three with their June on-sale issues.

Mad Magazine will arrive in stores with a cover price of $3.99 beginning with issue #454.

[/\/\att]

A minor annoyance, but necessary

[tanbat14]

Why are they changing the prices?

[gotham95]

[shadow=blue,left,300]Usualy it's because the cost of paper increases.[/shadow]

[tanbat14]

So will comic books reach a price higher then 2.99 or have they yet?




DieLaughing

[Dr. Crane]

Sometimes the prices of comics annoys me when im low on cash. I'd like to know how comics went from being 50 Cents to $2.25 lol.

[reideen1313]

tanbat14 said:

So will comic books reach a price higher then 2.99 or have they yet?
DieLaughing

They're certainly heading that way. The price of paper is one of the costs that contributes to the increase in paper. Even going back to newsprint wouldn't solve the problem, as it would be more expensive at this point than the current printing methods. The companies have changed their processes to allow for new inks, computer graphics, etc, and going 'retro' and printing on newsprint would require a lot of work and would result in a higher cover price.

Either we're going to see comic prices continue to increase, advertising taking a bigger chunk of the book, or the comic industry will cease to exist in a print format and all comics will be digital - much like the #1 issues that DC is putting out in their weekly newsletter and the issues that Marvel has on their site.

[BlackBat]

Just a question, but how can most magazines have a cover price of about $5, are printed similarly to todays' comics, and are about 125 pages, while the comics themselves have only 20some pages and are pushing the $3 mark? The cost offsets don't seem to match.

The only reason I can figure is a larger circulation of magazine readers, but I'm not sure that's it.

~Tim

[reideen1313]

Larger publications and larger buckets of advertising $ to offset costs. Even magazines have seen price increases though over the past 20 years. Wizard just recently upped their price by another dollar. (Personally, I think that's Gareb being greedy, but maybe it's just me.) People, Entertainment Weekly, SI, etc, have all increased their cost to meet today's standards. We're just so used to seeing a comic cost .25 or $1.00, $2.99 sounds outrageous.

[BlackBat]

Ah, was just wondering. Even though the magazines do have a much larger advertising budget, the comics are a little less that 1/5 their size, indicating that the printing cost should follow those same numbers making a comic a little less than $1.20 if compaired to even a $6 magazine cost.

I'll assume that the cost offset is due to the type of advertising that magazines get, and those advertisers pay more than the ones that we see in comics.

I was just trying to figure out the marketing logistics of it, since I knew there had to be something more to it than just circulation size to merit the extra dollar to dollar and a half price difference from compairison to magazines.

~Tim