Marvel Confirms Higher Price For Digital Comic, Explains Why

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Well, now it’s official: Marvel Comics’ Editor In Chief (and newly-promoted Marvel Entertainment Chief Creative Officer) Joe Quesada confirmed yesterday that the company’s same-day-digital release of Invincible Iron Man Annual #1 will cost more than the print version:

The Iron Man comic is over 60 pages, and in print it’s priced at $4.99, but on average for that kind of page count, we would have priced it at $5.99 or broken it up into three $2.99 issues. Our comics on the Marvel App are priced at $1.99 and the way the annual is written it breaks up nicely into three chapters perfectly, so that’s how we’ll break It up in the app. So, when you do the math on this one, the direct market comic shop has the advantage in price on this one, and we’ve already received word from retailers that they feel this is the best way to set this test up.

Well, of course the retailers are in favor; it means that they have a price advantage in this format experiment. And, as Quesada explained, that’s no accident. In fact, he says, Marvel may be experimenting with digital comics, but only as a means to an end to strengthen the print sales:

Whether folks choose to believe it or not, the direct market is always our first concern and keeping them in great product and healthy, as well as driving new customers into their stores, is our primary goal in everything we do in comics. As I mentioned, we chose the Annual for a few reasons. In this case, and it’s just a fact of our industry today, annuals tend to have lower circulation in the direct market then the monthly title it’s connected to. So, even if this were to take any customer away, the effects would be quite minimal. In fact, the hope would be that by testing a high profile writer, like Matt Fraction, on a high profile character like Iron Man, anyone who tries out the digital comic will most certainly want to go pick up his latest Iron Man issue and then perhaps his latest X-Men work and/or past collections. The place that they would do that and get directed properly to all of this would be at their local comic shops.

So, there you have it: Marvel Comics would rather you buy print versions of comics through comic book stores. Everyone can be happy with that result, right…? Oh, wait:

The only problem with that thinking is that Marvel Comics isn’t in the business of keeping retailers solvent. Marvel Comics is in the business of producing and distributing comic books to as many readers as possible. At least it SHOULD be. And if digital distribution has a chance of being more profitable than brick-and-mortar store distribution then Marvel owes it to it’s readers, creators and stock holders to pursue that business without having to worry about someone else’s business for nostalgia’s sake.

That’s PvP creator and webcomic guru Scott Kurtz, leading the charge for… well, smart business practices, if nothing else. I mean, yes, we know that retailers aren’t a big fan of the idea of digital comics undercutting their market, and I admittedly love the idea that Marvel feels protective of comic book retailers (Not so protective that they stop flooding the market with product, admittedly, but there are limits), but if Marvel truly feels, as Quesada goes on to argue, that digital doesn’t affect print sales, then there’s really no argument for keeping pricing so high on Iron Man beyond… well, greed. Wouldn’t it be better – or more honest, at least – for the publisher to just admit, “We have no idea whether or not this will mean less people buy the print version, so that’s why we upped the price to skew the results of this experiment”?

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