Marvel’s Axel Alonso Made Me Laugh This Morning

Marvel editorial point-man-in-chief on changing the price of Marvel's comics under the Marvel Now relaunch/soft reboot/not-what-DC-did-at-all-because-our-involves-Wolverine initiative: "There shouldn't be any unpleasant surprises on that front." Couching this response in terms of "You can rest easy prices won't be going up" instead of "No, we're not going to back away from $3.99 price points because short-term gains are more important than -- WHAT WAS THAT NOISE? IS SOMEONE HERE TO FIRE MORE PEOPLE???" is pretty great. I hope it was said -- or at least will be read -- with a sense of humor.

Anyway, as I've written a ton of times in the past, price increases in mainstream comics are particularly dangerous because the damage they do is indirect. There's almost never a 1:1 effect in terms of raising prices/losing sales. What you have is a bunch of general damage, such as people leaving the habit of buying comics because their $20 a week buys them four comics instead of six. This means a bunch of comics get dropped, not just the more expensive ones, and the culprit is obscured. In fact, the damage is spread out in a way it's hard not to look at the $3.99 comics and think, "Hey, they're doing okay because everything is hurting; plus we get a $1 more per issue sold for those books." If you were a super-villain making a trap for an entity like Marvel's publishing wing, that's the trap you'd set.

I'm not sure I've seen Marvel give an alternative explanation for why aspects of their sales started to weaken across the board when they did if it's not the general and indiscriminate damage caused by things like haphazard price increases and long-term inattention to structural issues like a trade program that feeds serial sales and coverage. I'd love it if they did get to what is going on, even if it were something out of left-field like "we know it's piracy" and stated how what they're doing now addresses those problems. There's some potential irony in that we seem to have an indirect solution -- goose the content -- for problems that may be concrete, while there's no mechanism for acknowledging that there are indirect problems as well.
 
posted 5:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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