Here's my relatively unscientific profile of comic book price trends, in response to my prediction that mainstream comics will all be $3.99 by next summer.This hastily-made graph on the left shows a sample of Amazing Spider-Man cover prices--from issue #55 to issue #555. I stuck with the issues ending in "55" because I figured that would avoid any double-sized issues and price problems. And I was too lazy to look up more than a handful of issues.
But you can clearly see the price trend, and by issue #655, scheduled for 2011 or so, the price should be at or above the four-dollar mark (if the graph continues in the same general direction). This graph doesn't account for the huge spike in oil prices which will probably drive the cost of EVERYTHING through the roof.
Thoughts?
2 comments:
Tim, great idea. But wouldn't ASM NOT be a good indicator, being that it comes out three times a month and therefore will hit 655 3 times as soon as it would have if it was a monthly? (It takes ~ 8.5 years to do 100 issues)g
You'd probably be better looking at, let's say, Uncanny X-Men, being that that's one of the books that never did a renumbering . Of course, they do go bi-weekly from time to time, but over the course of 40+ years, that wouldn't skew the data too badly.
I thought about that, but then I thought, "will ASM really stay thrice-monthly for several years? Maybe not." And I just went with it. The graph wouldn't change with the X-Men at all, anyway, it would just change my comment, and if we project ASM #655 as a monthly comic like X-Men, it's scheduled to hit around 2016. So, within the next eight years comics will be four dollars or more.
Except, we all know it will happen sooner than that.
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