At The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon dares speak the name of overpriced corporate comic books and wonders if a tipping point has been reached. Now, I often quote Tom as saying “The only comics that cost too much are shitty comics,” and certainly most corporate superhero comics are shitty comics, but $3.99 really does seem too expensive for most of what the Direct Market offers up as its saddle-stitched stock-in-trade, even the few good ones.

I think the great equalizer in this question is the pirating of downloadable, zero-day comic books. Because when you’re cutting your comics budget, the bad ones certainly will be the first to be cut, ignoring the crazy fact that a lot of comics buyers do consciously buy bad comics, you know, “to keep their collection intact.” But I’d imagine the easy availability of virtually every new release for free download is making it hard on the average, run-of-the-mill mediocre corporate superhero comic.

My willingness to pay a given price for the comics I want varies due to numerous factors, such as format, reproduction quality, creator(s), and other elements, but I think three bucks is about as much as I am really willing to pay for a floppy, saddle-stitched comic book that I may or may not like enough to bag and board and save for future re-reads. Twenty bucks is about as much as I’m willing to pay for a paperback collection, and forty seems the outer limit for decent hardcover collections. I balked at paying the cover price for that giant Kramers Ergot hardcover a year or two back, and don’t regret missing out on the many comics it contained by creators I loved, because there was just no way to justify it in my comics budget. The most I’ve probably ever spent in one shot on one publication was a hundred bucks for the Amazing Spider-Man Omnibus by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, and I trust I don’t have to justify that one to anyone. I know the quality of the comics and the re-readability of the book far outstripped whatever rewards I would have found by coughing up the cash for Kramers.

Ultimately we all have to decide what our breaking point is; in a down-turned economy with no real hope of recovery in sight this decade (or possibly this lifetime), I think $3.99 for 22 pages of Geoff Johns will soon sorely test the resolve of even the most dedicated spandex junkie. I do think many will go online (legally or not) to get that special tingle they get from bad superhero comics, and the canny comics publisher would do well to quickly and capably emulate the ease with which pirated comic books can be obtained. At a very low price point (say, 25 cents or less), readers may be willing to pay for the privilege of reading Marvel and DC’s crap on their computer screen legally instead of stealing it. But the companies need to act fast, because the no-cost alternative to their wares is already well-established and just waiting for a new influx of fed-up super-freaks looking to shave twenty or fifty or a hundred bucks from their weekly superhero budget without giving up any of the weak thrills those comics contain.

— Alan David Doane