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.
I stopped buying in the mid-90s and by that point I could already count the number of kids buying on any given Thursday to
It isn’t quite as simple as that.
One thing you have to consider is the fact the different page size. Actually only 3 of the 52 new DC Comics has a cover price of 3.99 the rest all cost 2.99.
The 3.99 comics do have a higher page count then the 2.99 titels have.