Homage to Mr. Whedon there, for his much-deserved recent success. But this is about COMIC BOOKS.
Are Comics overpriced? A 'Linked In' question made me go tangential.
Maybe not really... :D
I can only judge from my own experience, but I'm sure overhead at the majors is probably pretty restrictive (leading to many bad ideas--'the cloning experiment' as I like to call it--a general narrowing of what constitutes 'good'--but that's another story). Diamond won't even carry comics if they aren't a certain price, and if they don't follow minimum print runs/pricing ratio, while the difference actual print/paper costs have remained fairly stable for over a decade--paper increasing with inflation, printing cheaper. KaBLAM! and others provide an excellent, quick way to get the stuff out, but if people bunched print runs together for major catalog printing companies (as an example), they'd cost something like 40-65 cents per copy to print and ship. Promotion is a bigger problem, and is a nightmare for any upstart.
Having a Direct Market monopoly serves, unintentionally perhaps, to tamp down the Indy Market--providing endless variations on metaphorical Vanilla Ice Cream, because the powers-that-be think Vanilla Ice Cream is all that will sell, and are unwilling to promote, Chocolate or Strawberry, or the other 28 flavors. But EVERYTHING in our economy for the last decade seems to solely serve multinational corporations, and seems designed to neuter REAL 'Free-Market' entrepreneurship and creativity.
I might stay on this theme for a few days--dunno.
--JIM
