We may never get an official confirmation that Marvel has dropped their regular superhero books to 20 pages, but unofficial confirmation comes via Matt Fraction, who has given two interviews promoting next month’s Defenders book in the last week where he talks about the publisher dropping its page count, with quotes like this:
And industry-wide, everyone’s going down two pages. I learned to write comics in 16 pages, so 22 pages always felt pornographic. Going down to 20 is much more comfortable [for me], but it’s changing everything in a real way. And there are people that realize it, and people who don’t — who say, “it’s just two pages.” That’s 10% of a book. By the time you get to the end of six issues, that’s a whole other issue you’ve lost. I think you’re going to see people rising and falling on this. It’s a very different world, a different format, a different time signature.
The question is, with pagecounts officially falling, I wonder if we’ll see more Marvel books at a $2.99 price point as a consequence?
November 8th, 2011 at 10:26 am
What this really tells us is that despite his name, Matt Fraction is shitty at math.
November 8th, 2011 at 10:44 am
“The question is, with pagecounts officially falling, I wonder if we’ll see more Marvel books at a $2.99 price point as a consequence?”
Not if they can sell 20 pages for $3.99
November 8th, 2011 at 11:33 am
“The question is, with pagecounts officially falling, I wonder if we’ll see more Marvel books at a $2.99 price point as a consequence?”
HAHAHAHAHA
This is *Marvel* you are talking about. Defenders is already a $3.99 book, isn’t it?
November 8th, 2011 at 2:56 pm
Ironically enough, the fact that DC is currently trouncing Marvel on the dollar AND unit share fronts makes Marvel LESS likely to lower its prices, because unless that dollar price drop could guarantee an IMMEDIATE increase in unit sales — and remember, even DC was slow to see any sales gains from lowering their prices, until the New 52 — then all that people would see for the next quarter would be Marvel scoring an even SMALLER slice of the dollar share of the market, when compared to DC.
November 8th, 2011 at 6:42 pm
Marvel is not going to lower any prices. If they drop Avengers to $2.99 that is a 25% drop in sales dollars. That would mean that even adding say 20k in monthly sales that would only bring them back in dollars to where they are now*. There is no motivation for them to do that. I’m hoping that instead of a price drop on books already being published they will use the $2.99 price on more new ongoings a la Daredevil and Winter Soldier.
* Just guess-timating figures here but you all get my point.