More on prices

Gary Leach bangfish at cableone.net
Mon Jun 14 19:09:24 CEST 2004


Posted by Kintoun, relaying an item in Wizard Special: The Beginning of 
The VALIANT Era:

> 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.

Clarification: Dell was the distributor, not the publisher, of the 
Disney comics. The license for publishing Disney comics was always held 
by KK Publications - also known as Western.

Dell was in serious financial straits by the late 1950s, and this is 
mainly what drove KK Publications to raise cover prices to fifteen 
cents. By then the writing was on the wall for some kind of price hike 
by every publisher in the business, and KK reasoned that, as their 
books were practically wall-to-wall comics, theirs was a better value 
at fifteen cents than those of other publishers, which featured lots of 
ads, at ten or twelve cents.

Sound reasoning as far as it went, but all readers saw was that 
nickel-per-copy price increase (a whopping fifty-percent!) and did not 
react well to it. Push came to shove, and by 1962 KK Publications bid 
adieu to Dell and began distribution of the comics themselves, under 
their own Gold Key imprint. (Whitman was KK's publishing arm for 
children's books, for which KK had always handled distribution.) They 
also adopted the "industry standard" cover price of twelve cents, 
though that necessitated reducing the story content in favor of 
in-house promotion and activity pages.

It should be noted that, during the 1970s, Gold Key's line shrank to 
little more than licensed properties, including the Disneys - all of 
their in-house titles, such as Magnus and Turok, died off. (The Gold 
Key imprint was also retired and replaced by Whitman.) Much later, 
Valiant made a valiant effort to revive many of these, but were unable 
to make a lasting success of it.

Gary




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