Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
The calculations are interesting. I just spent some quality time with an inflation calculator myself. In general, the price increases seem to have outpaced inflation during the 80's, but have stayed below it since about 1990. The only catch is that the 80's bump was so significant that despite 25 years of lower than inflation price increases, paperback prices have still outpaced inflation overall.
|
The mass market price spike of the 70's and 80's was due to the older publishing houses buying up the previously independent paperback houses and raising prices to protect hardcover sales. Like they are doing today.
The price hikes in comics were different: comics used to be printed using excess newspaper capacity but as the newspaper business shrunk and consolidated most of the older, cheaper presses went away. That forced higher rates and shrunk the market which forced higher rates and new printing processes and still more hikes...
Compare the quality of paper and images in a typical floppy today with even the early "new format" and "deluxe" floppies of the early comic shop editions and the quality is entirely different. It's become very much a niche product with print runs that even in the 80's would have become unacceptable. A whole order of magnitude lower and two orders of magnitude lower than golden age peak, when (the real) CAPTAIN MARVEL sold over a million copies and more out of a weekly slate of titles.
Comics present a cautionary tale for pbooks of the slippery slope they're on.
Miind you, the comics industry itself has changed and adapted away from floppies as the cash cow, moving to original graphic novels, compilations, digital, and animation as well as IP exploitation. And the Indie side of the house has always managed to survive, if not exactly prosper. The biggest danger these days is actually the abundance of "comic book material" in both video and indie superhero fantasy ebooks.
Conceivably, the weekly floppy releases could go away and the industry would survive. Just totally unrecognizable.