Print comics are expensive!

Marvel Comics recently hiked the cover price of a traditional 32-page print comic to $3.99 per issue. When I was a kid, comics used to cost $1.00. It went up to $1.95 before I lost track in high school. These price increases are actually somewhat inline with inflation in general, but it's a bit hard to swallow with all the various forms of free entertainment out there.

It totally sounds like the bean-counters are hard at work at the House of Ideas. It's basic economics. They recognize that comic collecting is a habit and the demand from collectors for comic books is relatively inelastic. Therefore the potential loss in sales is more than offset by the additional $1 in profit. Capitalism at its best.

At some point, even the most hardcore collectors may give up. As many marketers are aware, a lost customer is extremely hard to get back. Since no one in the ecosystem is successfully replenishing the supply of readers, the comic industry will shrink further.

In a very interesting blog post, Aaron Albert calculates the entertainment cost per minute of a comic.. At $3.99 cover price, the "ECPM" value of a comic is $0.27. To put that into perspective, the "ECPM" for a movie is $0.11 and the "ECPM" for a video game is $0.05-$0.07. A World of Warcraft (WoW) subscription by comparison costs 2/10 of a penny per minute. That's cheap! No wonder Club Penguin and Runescape are such huge successes. Kids love them and they're extremely cost-effective.

Let's actually take it one step further. Compare $0.27 to the cost of the latest episode of The Office on Hulu or yesterday's episode of Star Wars: Clone Wars or the newest Kidjutsu comic, Serenian Century by Ruina (read right-to-left).

All have great "ECPM" value. Personally, I can't wait for chapter 2 of Serenian Century. I hope Ruina reveals more of the history of the war and what actually happened to brother Divanis (deviantArt print).