American comic book prices

Kintoun kintoun at shaw.ca
Sun Jun 13 23:34:06 CEST 2004


> Myth: The American comic book was 64-pages, all-in-color-for-a-dime for
> generations.
>
> Fact: From the mid-1930s into the early 1960s the standard American
> comic book cover price was - with few exceptions - a dime. However, the
> page count had shrunk from 64 to 32 interior pages, along with some
> shrinking of the physical dimensions and the inclusion by many
> publishers of outside ads and in-house promotions. In effect, the price
> of an American comic book more than doubled in this period.
>
> The early 1960s then saw the cover price of the standard American comic
> book - now fixed at 32 interior pages - go to twelve cents. In the late
> 1960s that price took another jump, to fifteen cents.

Wow. This is a fascinating post. I just want to add a small article from
Wizard Special: The Beginning of The VALIANT Era that adds further
information to that period of time. This magazine was devoted to Magnus,
Robot Fighter, Solar, Man of the Atom, Turok, Son of Stone, etc. but the
introduction dealt with "The History of VALIANT: From the Dell years to
today". It states:
-----------------------------------------------------------
After over twenty years of riding high on the success of its licensed
properties, Dell got a bit overconfident, and in 1961, became the first
comic book publisher to raise the price of its regular titles above 10
cents. While Dell comics now carried a 15-cent tag, most other publishers
managed to hold off price increases for another few months, and when they
did raise their cover prices, they went no further than 12 cents. Dell's
circulation plummeted overnight.

As a result of this fiasco, Dell decided its best course of action was to
forego the costly licenses, and rely exclusively on in-house productions. At
this point, Western determined that this was an unwise course of action, and
in 1961, the company decided it could handle things better than its
contractor could. The company terminated its relationship with Dell, and
started publishing comics on its own. Western took over Dell's most
expensive (and lucrative) licenses, including the valuable Disney license,
as well as high-profile TV licenses such as The Lone Ranger.

As Gold Key, Western was able to find its niche during the '60s, using a mix
of its high-profile licenses, such as Star Trek, Disney, and Tarzan,
alongside its own home-grown characters, such as Magnus, Turok, and Doctor
Solar.
----------------------------------------------------------------
By the way, if anyone is interested in learning more about these classic
superheroes, I highly recommend reading Solar, Man of the Atom #0 at
http://members.fortunecity.com/ao4/ccenter/introduction.html
followed by Rai #0 which can be found at
http://www.valiantcomics.com/valiant/rai0.asp

Kintoun





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