I am still to this day surprised we still have comic stores. It boggles my mind. Honestly.
And while I do think shops will be around a long time, I do think eventually comics will out-price themselves, it has to happen. Cost will always continue to rise on paper, ink and employee pay so of course comics will soon be $7 and they will die.
Floppies that is.
I realize/believe that the only true future comics have (as price will no longer make them viable once a certain generation of "completest" dies off) will be the trades and OGN. That I think is the future of comics, if anything.
Print will always have its crowd, slowly dwindling amount of fans perhaps, but fans, but even novels, by and large, has almost reached its price to inflation cap. Comics passed theirs very long ago. Comics rose past the inflation standard many years ago.
Take Matchbox Cars. Remember them? I do. (Well, I was actually on the other side, I was a Hot Wheels guys but hey a good Matchbox car was cool) Well I read an article back a few years back, maybe 5 years or so, that a guy wrote, talking about how he was flipping through a 1965(?) comic, a 12¢ comic, and there was an add for Matchbox. Each car was about 50¢ (something like that) and he did the math and Matchbox cars at the time of the article had gone up to ... I don't know .. $2 or so and how that equated to (using my pricing here, not his as I can't remember exactly what it was) ... it adds up to 400% increase. From 1963 to 2015(?) that isn't too shabby. Not really. But compare that to a damn comic? 12¢ to $3?
What is that ... "tap, tap, tap, carry the 8 ..." 2400% !!!!
See the problem?!?!?!
Comics, due to no-ones fault but how they are made, have gone up an insane amount vs any other form of entertainment out there.
How much was a movie in '65?
Crap ... now I have to look.
Okay, first off all I found that article I was talking about so let me edit that in ...
HERE is the hot Wheel / Comic comparison ...
and
HERE is the ticket price through the years. Now it goes back to 1910, but if you look at 1965 ... ish ... the average movie ticket was about $1. One dollar for a movie, 12¢ for a comic.
Now it is (on average) $9 for a ticket, $4 for a comic.
HAHA
Funny how that switched yeah?
Theater tickets still only went up 800% while a comic, today, went up 3,225%
3,000 percent increase?
HAHAHA
Yeah, it won't be long ... Comics are hanging on by their fingertips now ... It is only a matter of time before the ledge they are holding crumbles.