The High Cost of Reading Comics

If you’ve read, collected, and simultaneously loved and hated comic books for as many decades as I have, there are a few things you’ve probably noticed: prices have gone up, story count has come down, and those damned kids won’t stay off the front lawn.

Rather than writing a generic reminiscent gripe about whether or not I’m still getting the same actual value for my comic book dollar, however, I decided to do something crazy: I decided to set out and try to prove it, scientifically.

Now, I hear you. “How can you prove something like increased or diminished value with something like comic books?” Hey, back off man, I’m a scientist. At least I am one now. I know enough about sampling and statistics to be dangerously misleading, but this time I’m trying my best to play it straight. So I went down to the Cave of Wonders (also known as the Basement of Things My Wife Won’t Let Me Keep Upstairs) and dug through the catacombs of long white boxes to disinter several handfuls of comics from multiple eras.

So here’s an oldie from the collection: BATMAN 141, cover dated August 1961.  It contained 3 stories, told in 26 pages, 124 panels, and 3840 words. All in color for literally a dime! (Yes, children, back in my day comics cost a dime – and we had to walk barefoot in the snow, uphill, both ways, to the comic store to buy them. That’s a lie. We didn’t have comic stores, we had to go to the drug store and pick the least dog-eared copy on the spinner rack. You don’t want to know.)

Now, it’s not fair to complain about the difference between ten cents in 1961 and the average cost of a comic in 2016. I mean, that’s 55 years! So it’s natural that a comic should be expected to cost… Holy cow, does that say $3.99? Okay, that sort of blows away the Inflation Adjustment Calculator I used that told me the same comic from 1961 should have a cover price of 79 cents!  But using that adjustment, I figured out that my ROI (that’s Return on Investment – I warned you this was going to get scientific) was pretty good, considering I was only paying 3 cents a page, and a paltry $0.0002 per word. That’s almost free!

As I moved forward, I expected prices to go up. Even as little as 5 years later – August 1966 – TEEN TITANS 4 had gone up to a 12 cent cover price. For that, I lost a page of story, 5 panels, and almost 600 words! (25 pages, 119 panels, 3233 words for those who lost count already). And I got one story out of it. Adjusted for inflation, that’s an 88 cent comic that I was paying $0.000272 per word, so I still felt pretty good. That per-word price doubled in December 1975 though, with SUPERBOY & THE LEGION OF SUPER HEROES #213, when the cover price of a quarter (inflation adjusted to $1.10!) gave me only 18 pages of story, 97 panels and 2516 words, split over two stories (oh, but what a story it was!).

But picking random comics and counting all the words wasn’t getting me anything but a headache. I needed something more consistent to use as a baseline – something of a better control for my experiment.

So I picked a specific publisher, a specific title, and then I tried to pick different 12 issue runs – basically a whole year’s worth of storytelling – to truly test things out.  Now, this fell apart a little bit, because for some eras I simply didn’t have 12 consecutive books to go with, so some of the earlier runs skip here and there, and I show which books I used.  I also had to throw out one book from the 1990s because it had four pages of magazine style text in it as part of the story, and that wasn’t really representative of the series. But I think overall I remained fair to the process.

I chose DC Comics’ JUSTICE LEAGUE as the baseline for my experiment, because I have been collecting that title the longest and most consistently. Then I very carefully opened my notepad, sharpened my pencil, and set about to opening each book and…counting. Counting every panel, counting every word, deciding whether a sound effect should be counted as a word or part of the artwork. Decisions, decisions.

The results? Let’s start with the actual cost of the 12 issue run, adjusted for inflation:

Even adjusting for inflation, the cost for a 12-issue run has gone up. The adjusted prices remained pretty consistent, however, from the 70s through the mid-90s, and then suddenly took a spike and remained on an uphill climb ever since.

But that was okay, because we were getting more for our money, right?

Right?

Well, let’s compare the story counts of those same 12-issue runs.

So we’re paying more but getting fewer stories? That doesn’t seem fair!

Oh, RJ, are you the last person in the world to discover that writers are now writing for the collected trade formula? Nobody’s writing 22-page comics anymore, they’re writing 6 or 12 chapter graphic novels released serially! That paradigm shift can be seen easily in the graph – and it also began to occur in the mid-90s as Grant Morrison’s JUSTICE LEAGUE took to the racks.

And since we’re getting fewer – albeit bigger – stories, it should come as no big surprise that we’re paying more for a complete story. But just to see it graphically:

Yep, you used to pay a little over $2 for a complete story back in the day (actually, you paid less than that, but remember I'm adusting every dollar value except the actual cover price for inflation), and now you can shell out almost $13 before you reach the end.

So since I’ve gone to all the trouble to show that, let’s dig down to the really nit-picky values. Let’s see exactly what we’re paying at the page, panel, and word levels. As Steve Martin (and Ray Palmer) used to say, “Let’s get small.”

Wow. So what we’re seeing here is that we’re not just paying more per issue, not just paying more for story, but that the writers are actually telling the stories using, on average, fewer words and fewer panels, letting the pictures tell the story with cinematic splashes. Not that that isn’t an effective storytelling technique, but it’s interesting to see the impact it’s had on the comic business.

Now, that’s a lot of graphs, and it’s all looking at just one title from just one company. Maybe that’s not fair, but I only have so many days left on this rock and I’ve already spent too many of them counting words in comic books. But I’ll at least end this with a link to all the raw data so you can see the books that were used and a few other comics that were looked over in the general process. If you’re a number-slicing kind of person, this will make you giddy – both of you – for a few minutes. For the rest of you, thanks for indulging.

Now get off my lawn!