New Brevoort Formspring

>Mr. Brevoort, 

I want to start with a quote from the concerned fan. 

“If you have upper management telling you to continually raise the cover prices (man, I remember how many of those NOW! books were $2.99) then you could perhaps pass along the message that your readers (whom you don’t print correspondence from any more, even though your competitors still do) think that fucking sucks.”

To the poster, I get it. I really do. I’m in a rock and a hard place with comics right now. I’m currently an (unpaid) comic reviewer for two specific websites, one of which I’m slightly concerned is taking advantage of me by not paying me but still using my free digital codes for screenshots, as I don’t own a scanner. I shell out a lot of my hard earned money and it has deterred a lot of my life plans to the point where this year I cut back, dramatically. Times are really, (and I mean really), very difficult in my house hold. My partner brings home $5-600 a weekend and I work a whole month at my Green-Apron Café job where I make maybe $700 and we live in a state with very high taxes, very high unemployment rate, and we both have student debt. I’m also an aspiring comic book writer [read: starving artist]. Needless to say, I’ve dropped quite a few books. 

To Mr. Brevoort, 

I think you should know, a lot of those books were Marvel. In fact, as of 2012, I had stopped reading DC altogether due to the fundamentally flawed character decisions during New52. I had started picking up DarkHorse (Abe Sapien) and Image (Black Science, East of West, Pretty Deadly, Shutter, etc…) over the next two years. Very good stuff! Then I began expanding my horizons at Marvel and soon I was buying anywhere from $50-$70 a month worth of comics, and about 80% of that was going towards YOU.

Since mid-2013, I’ve had to drop all my Darkhorse books, all of my Image books save one (as I review it), my Titan book (Doctor Who 11) is hanging by a thread, and Boom!’s LUMBERJANES is mostly an acquired book for my partner and I to read together, otherwise I wouldn’t get it. (I also think it’s important to support books that promote diversity but that’s another point altogether).

Mr. Brevoort, I am concerned about comics and their prices because in this time I have also dropped 11 Marvel titles since the start of 2013. Most of which are (somehow) still not cancelled, even as I type this, despite being so pricey. 

I am down to very few comics and it is solely because of cost. Every single creator who I love is out there writing and designing some of the best stuff in comic history, all the characters I love to read are getting titles (SQUIRREL GIRL!!) and all the diversity and progressive writing styles that I look for are blooming left and right in these pages. 

But I am too broke to support it. I still try, though. I want my dollar to count. To matter. 

I’m fairly certain what this poster might have been asking is for advice on what WE can do, besides throwing money (we probably don’t have) at books to stop the price climb. 

I know certain books, like Amazing Spider-Man and Uncanny X-Men are mainstays, but then I see F4 being cancelled (for story purposes or not) it gives me chills. I would gladly purchase Slott’s books in trade but I had made the decision to do that with Soule’s She-Hulk and now look where that got me! Same with Superior Foes and Avengers: AI! I thought I could just wait for the trades. Do trades even matter if companies are canceling titles now before the trade is even on shelves? 

But see, if you say we can just save money for trades… then no one will buy the comic and they’ll sit around waiting for trades. And that puts great creators like Humberto Ramos, Dan Slott, Jon Hickman and many others at great risk. 

My point, in short for those who are TL;DR type TUMBLRs, is that we (the readers) need to put our dollar where we best believe it is going to be seen/used. If you support comic shops, get your hardcopies, pre-order everything. Don’t support every creator under the sun if you’re low on money, but find a story you believe is meaningful and worth your money, spend it wisely. If you can’t make it to the stores often and catching up is difficult? Maybe you should try waiting for trades or maybe go digital. Digital isn’t always cheaper to get, but you’re saving money on boxes and bags and definitely saving on space in your home. There’s more going on here than just simple “Make the price go down” or “Stop it from going up!” 

Find the solution that works for you and stop blaming Mr. Brevoort. 

Mr. Brevoort, as high up as he is, he does not control prices of comics. And sometimes, I don’t really think we do either. >

The one thing that I want to point out here is that the sales of collections absolutely do matter to the long-term health of any title. So any format that you happen to buy it in helps with the bottom line and a book’s continued existence. But that said, there are a lot of collected editions coming out every month as well, and it’s typical that a title that doesn’t sell well as individual issues similarly won’t sell well as a collected edition. That’s somewhat because a retailer will base the orders of the collected edition on the sales of the monthly. He (or she) too has a limited budget to work with, and needs to put those dollars where they’re most likely to earn back. It does occasionally happen that strong collected edition sales can keep a title afloat, but having strong collected edition sales without strong individual issue sales is very rare. And the same thing goes for Digital.