The HispanicPanic

stevemaser asked: Are all issues of the relaunched Howard The Duck going to be $4.99? Or just the first issue? Thanks!

zdarsky:
I have no control over the pricing of things at Marvel. I just got a phone call one day from Stan Lee where he said “FACE FRONT TRUE EXCELSIOR” and then made weird moaning sounds like he was enjoying a delicious sandwich. He then told me Howard was going to be $4.99. I flipped my LID and told him that I would quit in a few years if that was the case! But then he said there would be an extra ten pages of story in the issues. I paused for five minutes and did the math to figure out that it meant ten cents a page, which SEEMED okay, but it depended on what went on those pages. Would they be blank? Would they just be ten pages of Secret Wars they forgot to publish? So Stan sent me Chris Hasting’s script for the first instalment of his GWENPOOL backup and I laughed and squealed in delight because it was really good and absolutely worth ten cents a page.
I told Stan that I liked it and he said “My work’s done here! NUFF SAID!” but then stayed on the phone for another minute just breathing. It was nice actually! Really comforting.
Love,
Chip
OK, so I really like Chip Zdarsky, but I have to strongly disagree with this.
For comparison’s sake, DC is able to offer Batman (consistently, the highest-selling, and therefore more popular, comic in the industry by a reasonably large margin) with backups for $3.99. They have also included backups in Justice League and Sword of Sorcery, among others, again, without a price hike.
More importantly, it has greater implications on the industry as a whole. As Jude Terror over at the Outhouse said far more eloquently than I can:
brevoortformspring:
All of the issues that include the Gwenpool story will be higher priced.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, let me tell you a little bit about how capitalism works in the comic book industry. Corporations like Marvel and DC don’t price comics based on what they’re worth. If they did, they would be priced at something like 99 cents, which would make them actually competitive with other entertainment choices like video games of movies, which provide longer lasting entertainment on a per dollar basis. Comics, which take ten minutes to read and generally contain one fifth of a complete story, which is later released in trade paperback, cost $3.99, the same price as a three hundred page paperback novel. They’re priced like that not because of their value, but because that’s how much you’re willing to pay.
If Marvel and DC could charge fifty bucks for a comic, they would do that. They pretty much compete only with each other for a niche market that will probably continue buying mainstream superhero comics until the day they die, no matter what. With that in mind, it’s easy to see the trend of how corporate comics are priced. You start out with a standard price point… say, $1.99. And then you start to put out “special” comics priced at $2.50 and $2.99. As people get used to buying these, you slowly start to shift your regular comics to that price point until, before anyone realizes it, that’s just the new price of comics. Then you start pricing your “special” books at $4.99, and repeat the whole process.
This is what’s going on right now. Marvel puts out nearly all their event comics and special issues at $4.99, and DC even recently tried to raise the price of the regular Batman title to that price point. And history shows that readers will not hesitate to buy these “special” comics at that price. In fact, it usually results in a massive sales boost; see DC’s September gimmick month and Marvel’s Death of Wolverine for evidence.
Now, obviously, you and I don’t want to pay more money for comics, but as long as we will anyway, there is absolutely no incentive for Marvel and DC to not continuously hike the price. Not only is this bad for you and me, but it’s bad for the industry in general. It may result in more profits in the short term, but comics are already priced out of the range where a casual reader with interest in the medium can dive in without making a major financial commitment.
So how do we stop it? There’s only one way. No matter what, no matter how “special” the comic, no matter how much you want it, or how many issues you own in that series, or what it ties into, or how foil embossed the cover is, don’t buy it. If no one buys five dollar comics from Marvel and DC, Marvel and DC will not produce five dollar comics. That’s how capitalism works.
It’s with that in mind that, every week, The Outhouse recommends five comics that you can buy this week that cost less than five dollars. If there’s a super-mega-crossover event comic you want to buy this week, we encourage you to put it back on the shelf and buy one of these instead. Or any comic that costs less than five dollars. No excuses. No exceptions. No corporate comics for more than $3.99.
If there’s a creator-owned or small press comic that costs more than that, that’s okay. That’s a different business model where the book may actually cost more to make, with smaller print runs and the lack of a major corporation to reduce the costs. We don’t want to hurt creators. We want to send a message to Marvel and DC. So we’re focusing this effort, for now at least, on corporate comics priced at $4.99 or higher.
We hope you’ll all join us in this boycott, because if we don’t all stick together, we’ll all be paying $4.99 for the majority of our comics within a year of two.
Trust me, Marvel isn’t losing money on Howard the Duck. I don’t blame anyone for wanting to read the book because they like the character or the creators (I certainly do), but buying this book sends a message to Marvel that you’re okay with a 30-page, $4.99 comic. I usually try to avoid these kinds of call-to-actions, because I believe that what you buy or don’t buy is ultimately a personal decision, however, you should not be okay with spending that much for a single issue.