My Boycott of Marvel $3.99 Titles!

BIG NEWS: The economy is in the crapper! Unemployment is at an all-time high in many states! People have less disposable income!

Marvel Comics' response? "Let's increase the cover price on the majority of our books from $2.99 to $3.99, a whopping 33% increase with no added content or appreciable difference in quality." Insane.

I begrudgingly accepted the extra subtraction from my wallet, even after losing my job back in November. I enjoy reading a lot of Marvel titles and a lot of DC titles, as well as a selection of comics from smaller publishers. But the number of Marvel titles moving up to the $3.99 price point keeps increasing. The final straw for me was Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada's tweet back on April 7th: "G' morning, Marvel U! Is DC still publishing comics? Just curious." Arrogance. I can't stand arrogance. He may have meant it as humor, but I've seen the man at conventions, listened to him speak on panels. He ain't funny. I removed him from my Twitter feed.

So this week I stopped buying all Avengers titles. Christ, there's so many! Don't get me wrong, I like Bendis' writing, but Dark Avengers, Mighty Avengers, New Avengers... really? It's the "make everything X-Men related by putting an "X" in the title and we'll make a mint! Bwa hahahahaha!" thing all over again.

(Yup, I stopped buying "X" titles years ago.)

Every week, I will look at the cover price of Marvel books. It's time to start putting back every $3.99 (or higher!) comic I pick up from my regular pulls, unless there is some appreciable reason for the increased price. (Appreciable reasons might include a larger-than-normal page count ending a storyline, a significant anniversary-numbered issue, or a one-shot by a writer or artist whose work I find particularly interesting.)

Four dollars is simply too much for a comic book. The only way consumers can get the corporate types to understand this is to stop purchasing them. Draw a line in the sand.

Oh and friendly competition? Cool. Arrogance in a public forum? Not cool. Step off.