Remember when Mark Millar announced Night Club, the Image Comics mini and soon-to-be Netflix series about a teenager becoming a costumed vampire? In the press release, the Scottish superstar scribe declared that the $1.99 cover price he slapped on the book marked the first time in comics history someone charged less money for a new series. That, of course, isn't true. Image Comics’ Fell and Casanova did this back in the mid ‘00s, which the creators also released at the same price point. Granted, that was almost 20 years ago and most comics were going for $2.99 then, not the $3.99 and $4.99 which have become the standard price points in today's market.

What Millar did on Night Club raises some questions. For one, do pricing stunts like these work? And do they work for all? Or is there an easily overlooking downside to releasing comics at a price point that's much lower than the standard? In the end, does it all add up economically for publishers, creators, and retailers alike?

A first easy answer would be to look at the numbers. But since Diamond Comic Distributors no longer represents Image Comics nor most of the bigger publishers – BOOM! Studios and Dynamite Entertainment being notable exceptions – looking at their sales charts is no longer of any use.

Drake Robinson, Director of Logistics at Graham Crackers Comics, the largest comics retailer chain in the US, says Millar's stunt didn't do the trick. "Night Club sold worse than Ambassadors (another new Millar book - ed.) did for us, which came out afterwards and had a $3.99 price point. Customers are more directly influenced by creators on a title, and the content, than by price decreases."

That's a sentiment echoed by other people we spoke to. Filip Sablik, President Publishing & Marketing at BOOM! Studios says, "Most comic shop customer decisions are driven by content first and foremost. If a customer wants a comic they may choose not to purchase it if the price is outside of their budget, but customers generally don't purchase anything they weren't planning to purchase because of a lower price. 'Value priced comic books' is a strategy that has been tried numerous times over the years by a variety of publishers and I've never seen it drive a meaningful enough increase in copies sold to justify the reduction in sales price."

Sablik says that from a publisher point of view it makes more sense to offer more story content, like 48 pages, for the same $4.99 than doing 22 pages at a lower cover price. Jeff Lemire and Greg Rucka, two creators we spoke to for this article, are using the strategy of extra content on some of their new books: Fishflies and The Forged, respectively, both at Image Comics.

Lemire explains his reasons as such, "Fishflies is $5.99 but the issues are 56 pages. So you’re getting almost 3 comics worth of story for less than the price of two. The marketplace is so crowded right now and everyone’s dollars are already stretched, so my thinking was to make the series affordable for readers and not have the extra-sized issues be a barrier for buying it but actually an incentive. More story. Less money."

Rucka's The Forged, which he co-writes with Eric Trautmann with art by Mike Henderson, is a 64-page, magazine format comic with an initial cover price of $5.99 for the first three issues. The team is increasing the price to $6.99 as of issue #4 to make the whole operation sustainable.

"That's the only reason we're changing the price point," Rucka says adamantly. "The gamble, with creator-owned comics much more so than on a Marvel or DC book, is in setting a cover price that will allow, at the minimum, a break-even, so that the book can sustain itself without racking up crippling debt. As it stands, The Forged isn’t breaking even yet — we’re not moving nearly enough units at this price point to do so. All other factors being even — whether the book has found an audience, whether retailers even know about the book, whether the book is something readers, having once found it, are interested in buying — the $5.99 per issue price was simply too low to offset our costs outside of the most extraordinary circumstances. Hence the need to increase the cover price by a dollar and the hope that it won’t drive readers away."

A discussion about comics pricing means looking into all of the costs involved in putting a comic on the stands. Those costs can be split up into fixed costs on the one hand, and variable ones on the other. The former are costs that stay the same regardless of the amount of copies printed or sold, while variable costs do factor in those numbers. From a publisher's perspective, Sablik clarifies the difference as follows, "Fixed costs include things like the money paid to the talent creating the comics, distribution fees, and the publisher's overhead. Variable costs include things like printing, shipping, and marketing and advertising expenses. Within costs like printing are hidden the costs of paper, running the actual presses, and labor costs. At the end of the day, the price point is determined by answering the following question: If we sell the number of copies we expect to at this price, will this be a profitable project and will the market bear the price enough to sell the copies we project?"

In line with Sablik's breakdown and the fact that comics publishing often boils down to units sold versus the cost involved, Rucka raises an interesting point. "The more units a printer prints, the cheaper the cost per unit. Thus, if a book can guarantee, say, 50,000 copies, the printing price is much cheaper for the same book at 10,000 copies. Marvel and DC generally print in huge volumes and thus are able to do so for much much cheaper, yet they charge the same $3.99 or $4.99, with ads even, that creator-owned books do."

Going back to Mark Millar's Night Club, for it to 'break even' as Rucka puts it with its $1.99 cover price, the book would have to sell roughly double the amount of copies than it would at today's median price point. Which it didn't, if Graham Crackers' sample size is any indication.

Furthermore, Drake Robinson points out that lower price points are detrimental to retailers. "Ever increasing rents, labor costs, utility bills are just some of the challenges comic shops face, and asking us to try and keep up while selling books at a price point from the year 1999 is not an ideal route for growth."

Robinson considers today's median prices of $3.99 and $4.99 to be valid price points in light of inflation. "Prices used to increase far more often, and have actually been more stagnate in the last 10 years than in any decade prior. $3.99 became the average cost of a comic back in 2010, and then lasted until the pandemic. That was a longer time period than the 12 cent comic era many think of which only lasted 1962 to 1968. More recently the $2.99 price point only lasted as the average from 2006 to 2009. Comic books, like all goods and services, cost more every year, but are faring far better than other entertainment sources in terms of price increases."

In conclusion, from what we can tell, putting out comics that are much cheaper than the market average doesn't pay much dividends for publishers, retailers or creators. And they hardly ever pave the way for long-term sales success on subsequent issues or a creator's other body of work. In the end, it all comes down to what readers feel gives them a good bang for their buck. Or, as Rucka says, "I can sell a book for a dollar in the hopes that it’ll hook an audience, with an eye to raising the cover price 'once they’re in,' but the fact is, if the book is crap, if audiences don’t connect with it, then it doesn’t matter how cheap it is."

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