Does It Matter That Marvel’s January Prices Maybe Didn’t Quite Match Their Vague NYCC Announcement?

I'd say in the immediate sense, it doesn't matter too much that Marvel's January price points as since announced don't quite match the positive interpretations given their rascally, vague New York Comic Con announcement regarding a scale-back in pricing. I mean, if this is how things will stand, I think it makes them look bad that they had to follow up on DC's more substantive pricing announcement that way. I can count on one of Nightcrawler's currently deceased hands the number of times Marvel has chased a DC announcement since, I don't know, 1976. And I think anyone that combined the headlines of those two announcements and didn't make a distinction between the scale of the DC initiative and Marvel's asserted one did Marvel's bidding on that one: Marvel got the benefit of softening DC's announcement but also maintained enough space there to get to criticize its rival for dropping pages in the current freelance market and to subtly underline its point before DC made its move that Marvel's books just might be worth that extra coin.

Still, the importance of the DC announcement wasn't to my mind ever properly interpreted by looking at the competitive relationship between the two companies, or even in terms of it being some sort of potential windfall for DC. Clearly DC's ability to benefit long-term depends primarily on their making comics their retail partners want to support in a significant, passionate way, and secondarily but importantly on their being a better publishing partner in a variety of ways. I think industry health was a different set of concerns here. To my mind, the greater importance of DC scale-back is that it reduces the number of $3.99 books on the market, a growing fact of today's comics shopping that I think was grinding against the goodwill of longtime serial comics buyers in part because the standard purchase isn't one such book but four or five of them. No matter how it turns out in execution, Marvel's move -- and its unannounced reduction of titles generally -- seem it will also contribute to hedging against the generally less appealing marketplace of individually-built combination purchases that I think poses the larger danger to a certain way of comics buying.

None of this is very sexy; it's like someone changing a diet that will almost certainly kill them to something that reduces that risk and maybe only reduces that risk. And although we won't likely give such moves credit, if the Direct Market rallies I think it will do so partly because the end result is there is less pressure on the market to continue their appeal to individual customers at a likely higher overall price point while it undergoes its current, necessary transformation. Whether or not there ends up being positive change within this window of opportunity, that's going to be the tough part.
 
posted 8:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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