They may be paying Alex Ross and Adam Hughes too much also.

There are two ways to increase income. Raise prices and lower prices. Higher prices increase income, unless there is a corresponding drop in readership. Lower prices reduce the income, unless it is followed by an increase in readership. Of course the crux is “what will the corresponding drop or increase” be. If it’s more work for the same money, then it’ll likely not happen.

This is the same quandary politicians are endlessly debating about how to raise government income, do we raise or lower taxes?

For those that think TPs are cheaper than floppies, it’s rarely true. I can most of the time look at the MSRP of a trade and divide by $3 to determine the number of issues contained within. Some TPs are a few dollars cheaper, but only by 10% or so of the cost of floppies. Some are even a couple of dollars more expensive than the originals.

The other problem with tablet readers is what happens to those double or triple splash pages? Electronic readers are only one page at a time. (sigh).

Stephen

I get %30 off at my LCS to that helps with things like this. Boy gone are the days that $10 got me like 9 books plus a couple out of the quarter bin.

Both Marvel and Dc had better seriously consider some type of digital distribution approach. Because though it may not work for many longtime readers the torrenting of comics is widespread and common. Hell I pull a lot of titles and torrent many more. Most times I later buy the trade (honest). But their missing the boat if they don’t find a way to go with the flow. Kids and Teens do everything on their computers.

The ultimate goal would be some type of almost Star Trek like tablet reader, the iPod of digital periodicals if you will. Go to iTunes DL NA, Iron Fist and Batman for like .99. But to make anything like that happen it would have to be a “team-up”. It could have multiple benefits maybe even buy your issues of Time Magazine this way. Really pump the value up, it can’t just be a comic reader it needs to be able to support all kinds of Magazines.

I was curious about the Japanese Magna/comics market, because it is such a widespread thing over in Japan, I’d heard. Like you said, instead of people reading the paper or a novel on the train to work, they read comics. So I was wondering with it being so wide spread, if it affected the price.

Some also follow the monthly format, but most are black and white still and cost roughly the same or comparable to ours, some cheaper some more expensive depending on popularity. Thats not to say none are colour and most of the series have random coloured pages or chapters every once ina while.

The industry is quite huge as well and much more diverse than the North American or even Europe markets. It is not uncommon to see many adults reading manga on the way to work and it is an accepted part of Japanese lifestyle. Most books are collected in the smaller sized digest format that most manga and even Spider-Girl and Runaways have been released as in North America. These are typically cheap and about $10.

The manga industry is an entirely different beast compared to our comics and do not let the stuff that makes it out over here fool you into thinking it’s all DBZ or Naruto or Pokemon. Those are just a drop in the bucket from the more children to early teen genres and barely scratch the surface of the manga genres. You can find crime stories, dramas, teen love, mysteries, historical or samurai style books and many of these are drawn in a much different style than the “big eye” stuff most people associate with manga.

On top of that, there is the amateur dojinshi books that are put out by aspiring mangaka and are all self published. Another neat fact is that a lot of manga are written and pencilled / inked by the same person and many of the mangaka put out multiple books a month compared to the work load of the average american comic artists. Many of the manga are treated like literature books over here and are optioned for movies far more often than our comics are and many are adapted for live action dramas or even radio plays.

Hope that helped with your understanding of manga. Most have no idea what it is aside from what they see on television or know from anime’s that air on US television.

Kirk Warren
The Weekly Crisis
http://www.weeklycrisis.com