Big 68 Pages Don’t Take Less

May 27, 2010

They say a picture is worth a thousand words….so thats just saved me explaining any of the above.

Posted by themagicrobot
Filed in Comics, Strato, Thorpe and Porter

2 Comments »

2 Responses to “Big 68 Pages Don’t Take Less”

dirigible Says:

May 27, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Makes DC’s announcement today of $3.99 for their 32-page comics look even more ridiculous.
That’s a 33% jump, and equivalent to it costing $8.47 for a 68-pager.

The average wage in 1966 was £25.64, so you could buy 560 68-page comics for a week’s wages (or the same number of lower page-count DCs/Marvels). Last year’s average wage was £489ish – assuming that hasn’t risen and new comics will sell for £3 after the price hike (which is roughly what current $3.99 comics go for), that’s a weekly comic buying power in 2010 if you starve yourself of 163 32-page comics —- 29% of 1966 comics purchasing power.

Getting silly: As you don’t get 68-page anthologies any more, the potential page count for that weekly wage has gone down from 38080 a week (560 x 68) to 5216 a week (162 x 32) 13.7% of the 1966 value. Still at least that’s saved a bit of reading time – after all, if you spent an average of 40 seconds on a page, that would have been 17.71 days a week reading (without stopping) to get through all 1966s 560 comics, whereas nowadays it’s only 2.42 days reading.

er…yes I know that you couldn’t have bought that many comics each week back in 1966, but you get my drift …
themagicrobot Says:

May 27, 2010 at 4:08 pm
I love the maths.

My first brush with inflation came in 1966. The Second-hand book stall at the local market increased his comic prices from 3d to 6d and overnight I found I could only buy 5 comics a week instead of 10 with my half crown pocket money. (Or you could return 2 comics and get one back in exchange..a quick way to deplete your collection…) But he charged the same price whether it was a standard DC/Marvel or an 80 page Giant or an Alan Class comic(or even a flimsy old UK Marvelman) so I aimed for the 80 page Giants every time !!!

So, now you tell me I’m going to be paying $3.99/£3?? Good grief !! As it is if I had £1 for every comic I ever bought I’d have etc etc (walks off into the distance mumbling/grumbling…)