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Jesse James Is Holding The Line At $7.99

Published Sun, 20 Jan 2013 11:00:54 -0600

Jesse James writes;

Did Amazing Spider-Man #700 open the door for more price hikes in 2013?

You bet it did. In fact, get ready to open your pockets even more as DC Comics announces that Detective #19 (Detective #900) will also sell for $7.99. Guess what? The fans are going to yell and scream and kick some tires, but come Wednesday they will buy it like its going out of style.

It wasn't the fact that Amazing Spider-man was a major investment for the retail stores. It was more of a "will the fans buy a comic with that price tag on it?" A lot of stores found themselves pre selling their comics for less to cover their bill. Some offered deep discounts if you bought a bundle of the regular cover. In most cases they were right to push out as many as they could. However, the fans came to the game with cash falling out of their pockets and most stores sold out of all their product at cover price or more.

On the Steve Ditko variant cover, some stores were furious with Marvel for changing the game. Going from a 1:700 ratio to a 1:200–a handful of stores had committed themselves to that hefty bill to have a very exclusive 1:700. But in the end Marvel realized not enough stores partook of this variant and they went the other direction.

However, here is the problem; Marvel got a taste of what the consumer is willing to spend and we will eventually see $2.99 disappear and more and more books hit $3.99. We will probably start seeing $4.99 books appear this year as well. Don't hold me to $4.99, and I hope I'm wrong, but it's going to happen sometime in the very near future. (Anybody remember ASM #600?)

Now, I know some of you are saying, "Look how many pages you got." True, but did we have a choice? There wasn't a Spider-man #700 without all the fluff pages that maybe a small amount of people read.

It's always the same though, since I started collecting 30 years ago. I have yelled and screamed that the publishers had a price hike and I was not going to buy another comic. You learn though that you have to, or leave the game cold turkey. Its in your blood and you have no choice but to buy it.

So are Marvel and DC going to be successful charging more for their comics as the year rolls on? Yes, they will. In the end, the only people that can stop them is us, the fans. Yes, we just shouldn't pay those prices; we should boycott the companies in protest of the prices they charge now and in the foreseen future. For some reason though, even with the future price hikes, I have a feeling time will see us all at our friendly neighborhood comic shop, buying the next big comic no matter how high the cost. And after we go outside and yell and scream and kick some tires we'll get home and read that comic from front to back and back again, realizing that, no matter the cost, we just plainly love our comics.

A final note, I suggest you get your own tires.

Jesse James

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