It’s not an off-chance; it’s a relative certainty with the only unknown being how long it will take. History has proven it. Sure, I’ll enjoy it while it lasts, however long that is, but I can just hear future fandom’s teeth gnashing now when those comics break the $3 barrier again.

At Comic-Con, DC admitted that the Drawing the Line campaign failed; it yielded temporary sales increases that immediately began dwindling again. But, simply raising the prices back to their old level would have been disastrous, so they realized they had to try something else, a something else that became the upcoming relaunch. I don’t know why they didn’t think of simply trying to make their comics better in the first place; readers just might have been willing to pay $3.99 for a Geoff Johns / Jim Lee Justice League comic.

When the prices start going up again, and they will, at least we (hopefully) will be getting a better product than what we were when the prices dropped.

That seems rather defeatish to me, and I’m not so sure I agree.

I applaud DC for trying something. Yeah, it may not be to everybody’s tastes, but neither is a $4 comic. I’m hoping that their new initiative and price point makes a difference and turns the tide, but I’m also a realist. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to shoot myself in the foot and support $4 comics at the same time, however. Marvel has not gotten a dime of my money since they forged ahead with $4 books. Their loss has been DC’s, and Image’s, and Dark Horse’s, and IDW’s gain.

And, the slow loss of pages….makes waiting past a month for issues even more embarassing.

Regarding advertising, some have suggested over the years actually ADDING 8 or 16 pages, all ads, to a standard comic book, to hold the price down and preserve the story page count. This is actually closer to the business model for many periodical magazines, but I wonder with so many publications having difficulty filling advertising space nowadays, this would probably no longer work.

Maybe that’s why comics feature so many inhouse ads, come to think of it.

So why are we arguing about whether it’s possible or advisable to keep the line at four times that price? One big clue comes from looking at the ad pages inside a 1972 comic and comparing them against a current Marvel one. The 1972 comic is almost entirely populated by paid (and generally smaller) ads, whereas most current Marvel and DC comics feature only full page ads with “house ads” taking up a great deal of the salable space. In short, the $4 comic of today needs to be supported by its actual street price, whereas the $0.20 comic of 1972 was largely supported by its advertisers.