[Teuthida]

Ranty rant time.

To be fair though, illegal downloads are not the reason the industry is the way it is.

Comics used to be a lot more affordable and they printed a lot more. 300,000 an issue used not even be enough to keep a book alive in the 90s. Now 15,000 (which is what I believe Invincible sells) is decent. 45,000 for a top Marvel book I think.

There are also few places outside of comic shops that sell single issues. The average non comic reader isn't going to walk into a shop on a whim to pick up a $3 22 page comic book.

If the price just increased from inflation alone then comics should be about $1.80, but they're all approaching $4 an issue. They're $4 because they can get away with it for that price. The smaller companies follow suit to keep up. Rather than increase their readers Marvel and DC rely on their loyal fanbase to just buy the higher priced comics. Both Marvel and DC make the majority of their money from their movies and tie in merchandise anyway.

When you only sell small numbers it's harder to keep the print cost per issue down. Marvel and DC do not have this problem. They could easily lower the price. The smaller guys need to sell at these higher prices to even make a profit. Hell, the series I worked on, both black and white, one was $8 for 50 pages and the other $5 for 22. That's insane. Not the best example since i dunno the print number of each. Rather small for the second one I know...and the dude wanted to make more than just break even.

Which is why I see single issues becoming a thing of the past. As for digital comics, there's a service coming called Longbox which is suppose to be the comics equivalent of iTunes where you can purchase comics. It'll be the same format as cbr though so you'd be able to read all your illegals through it but I'm hoping it'll get folks not reading comics to read more.

I prefer reading physical books though. I think (or hope) graphic novels will take over the industry. I like the idea of buying single issue digital comics and once collected into a trade you'd get a discount if you bought some of the singles digital issues.

Once Kindle comes out in color and in more hands, that will be an awesome way to buy and read digital comics.

I used to like the distribution method of manga in Japan but after learning more about it and the restrictions I'm not so keen on it anymore. Still, comics as 40% of all printed media is impressive. Almost every comic gets 20 pages a week bundled in a huge thick book with others aimed at the same target audience. Europeans comics are on the complete opposite side of the spectrum where it could take years to release a book but it'll be the highest of high quality.

What was my point again...? Oh yeah, the industry sucks and I blame the big two.

And kids only buy manga. The average age of the American comics buyer is around 30.

Damn kids. But I guess can't expect to shell out allowance on 44 pages of comics when for the same price could get a couple hundred pages of manga....of course the pacing is different and- I should just stop.