Recently, DC Comics rebooted their entire line of stories. I hadn't read comics in a year or two, but I was intrigued. I stopped by the local comic store and picked up the new books. The price of the new issues was $3.99 a copy.
I thought to myself that the price is really rising. When I got home, I read a great article on comparing the price of comics to the minimum wage by Von Allen.
Soon I was wondering what the relative cost of comics was in the past. I mean, I know they were 10¢ in the 50s, but what does 10¢ in 1950s dollars compare to in 2011?
So I did a little research. I looked up the cover price of comics over the years on Wikipedia and I used a site called Measuring Worth to covert prices in the past to prices today based on the Consumer Price Index.
I threw all the values into a spreadsheet.
| Year | Cover Cost | Cost Adjusted To 2011 $ (CPI) |
|---|---|---|
| 1950 | $0.10 | $0.91 |
| 1962 | $0.12 | $0.87 |
| 1969 | $0.15 | $0.89 |
| 1971 | $0.20 | $1.08 |
| 1974 | $0.25 | $1.11 |
| 1976 | $0.30 | $1.15 |
| 1977 | $0.35 | $1.26 |
| 1979 | $0.40 | $1.20 |
| 1980 | $0.50 | $1.32 |
| 1981 | $0.60 | $1.44 |
| 1985 | $0.65 | $1.32 |
| 1986 | $0.75 | $1.49 |
| 1988 | $1.00 | $1.84 |
| 1992 | $1.25 | $1.94 |
| 1995 | $1.50 | $2.15 |
| 1996 | $1.95 | $2.71 |
| 1997 | $1.99 | $2.70 |
| 2000 | $2.25 | $2.85 |
| 2005 | $2.50 | $2.79 |
| 2006 | $2.99 | $3.23 |
| 2011 | $3.99 | $3.99 |
Graphed it looks like this:
Looking at the graph we can see that the relative price of a comic book stayed around a buck until 1970 or so, slowly ramping up to a buck fifty over the next 15 years. That's a 50% increase. From 1985 to 2000 the price almost doubles (100%) getting neat three dollars. From 2000 to 2011, it's around a 33% increase.
It's a fact that costs increase over time, so I'm not saying prices could remain at a buck forever. But it is hard to see how young kids and teenagers can get into comic books, it's simply too expensive. For $20 you get 5-7 books. Serious comic readers will pick up 10-20 books a week. A few years ago, when I was a more regular reader, I would the totals of other people routinely $30-50 a week. That's $120-200 per MONTH. There can't be many parents helping pay that much for a kid's comic habit.
Perhaps comics are now becoming a purely adult pastime. That would be sad. The joy of reading, sorting, and collecting comics was a wonderful part of my youth.