I agree, it's a shame that some really good books are going to suffer because of the price hikes. Nova is actually my favorite comic right now and I'm afraid it is going to be lost at some point.
Me too. We'll see if WAR OF KINGS gives it any sort of boost. X-MEN KINGBREAKER was the best selling of the space books right now, selling over 30k more or less. NOVA at the very least has remained steady at 25k for two months. Hopefully whatever retailer fat-trimming that has been done to save money for the higher priced bigger books has ceased. NOVA and many of the ANNIHILATION era space books have proven to have a small but loyal following; they've usually been faring better than the last Marvel cult franchise, the RUNAWAYS, for at least a year now.
Back to the rise in cover price, being a publisher myself, I can tell you that we can overcome some loss in ad revenue, but when we are getting hit repeatedly with a 50% increase in our costs to print, increase in fuel charges for delivery, and just a general increase in inflation it is more than we can handle when it is coming from all sides. My publication is a free community paper so I can't really start charging without losing circulation and causing my advertisers to lose response to their advertising, but for a publisher that is already charging a cover price raising it is an easy if not temporary fix. It's kind of a darned-if-you-do, darned-if-you-don't situation. I see it in the newspaper industry all the time, papers raise their cover price thinking they will increase revenue, when all it does is make some people not buy their product at all and then the advertisers start losing customer response to their ads. So in fact, they lose revenue in the long-run. It's a terrible cycle, but one that happens daily.
Yeah, I do understand that it is a rock/hard place problem. With the loss of ad revenue, Marvel needs to make up those losses to keep their publishing arm level at the least, much less making a profit (they earn more from movies now, but Marvel's publishing arm held steady in their 2008 end quarter report; a feat considering the collapse of many of the print medium during the recession). Ad dollars are so desperate that Marvel is willing to peddle a WB/DC cartoon, WONDER WOMAN, on back covers (as well as THE DARK KNIGHT, a few months ago).
That said, Joe Quesada has been less eager to hold prices down than Bill Jemas was; when Jemas was still around, there were still some books at $2.25 as recently as 2004-2005. Soon as he left, they were $2.99 within about 12-18 months, line wide. Even the kiddie books (Archie and DC keep their kid books cheaper, usually about $2.50). Therefore, it is little surprise that when times got tough, Joe Q lifted prices for a good 60% of their books an extra buck with no gradual phasing period, and cynically dismissed all criticism as, basically, "our customers are loyal suckers", not much different from many big wigs involved in professional sports.
Some have suggested adopting the Japanese model; cheap anthologies on crap grade paper for the lowest price, better grade B&W for a middle price for each franchise, and the full color, full grade highest price for the hardcores. They claim that since this works in Japan and those comics, even now, sell double or triple what American ones do combined, it should be attempted. The only problem is that Japan as a society views comics a bit differently. They may be more mainstream than they are in America, even despite a good 8-10 years of comic-themed blockbuster films. It is not uncommon in Japan to see the most straight-laced businessmen reading a manga on the train; you are far less likely to see that in America.
It is a cycle, but the problem with cycles is that if you or a business enterprise, or an entire industry, just collectively shrugs it's shoulders and goes, "such is life", eventually it may collapse. It remains to be seen what the impact of the higher prices will be overall in comics, but from sales figures I saw in January and February, the big books are still selling about the same despite the hike in prices, but a lot of the middle and low selling books that once were stable have lost thousands of readers, and even books that were only seeing low "diminishing returns" have increased. ASM weekly has fallen below 60k a week, something that in 2008 seemed impossible. Beyond UNCANNY X-MEN, all the X-Men books are selling under 70k. Random, unpromoted Wolverine or X-Men one-shots can't even sell within the Top 60 anymore. This is an industry that views losing some 2-4% of it's readers a month, every month, as "normal" and just shrugs and waits for the next steroid injection, the crossover, to give a boost before it starts again.
Frankly, the biggest problem with the comic industry is that they are businesses run by people who usually have no clue how to run a business (being artists/writers at heart), and usually all they can come up with to solve a problem is, "well, let's use what worked in 1994/1984/1974". It's a backwards cottage industry, and I sometimes fear for it's long term health, especially since I naturally do enjoy many of the characters.
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