I understand what you're saying but there are a few things you're not mentioning. 1. First off marvel has already lied about the reason for the price increase. Nothing wrong with being upset when someone lies to your face and takes your money.
Secondly, yes I'm gonna drown small children in the swamp.
Your analogy is a touch flawed. Let me reset it for you. You've got these tenents and a rent rate that is making you money. There's a recession and you're still making money. 2.Would you then suddenly raise the rent by one third just to see if you could get some extra money? It seems reckless and quite a bit dickish.
Also, I like Marvel. I like them as a company and want to see them around so my kids can read things like Spider-Man (who should be back to being a hero by that time) so maybe I can place a little morality in their evil little hearts. So I'm not just upset because they're taking my money away but I also think this is piss poor buisness. The industry has shown that when the bubble bursts companies suffer badly. Marvel is all short term here and it's gonna bite them in the ass. Did they learn nothing from the 90s? Conduct it like a buisness, that's great and fine by me, but maybe using enron as that buisness model wasn't the best call.
I thought I'd adress these other points:
1. And I don't excuse that. Won't even try to make excuses for them. You get caught in a lie: man up, say you're sorry, and try to move on and make up for it. Period. Won't get an argument from me there.
2. I want to answer this in a way that I don't completely come off as a slumlord, but the simple answer is yes, I would. Let me expand your analogy a little, though, to make it more comparable to Marvel's situation (or at least how they see it.) Say for years and years, I've been renting an apartment for $300. It's enough to cover the mortgage (cost of doing business) and maybe $50 left over as profit. This is simplified, because it's a little more complex than that, but I've already put half the forum to sleep. Now, say last month a friend of mine told me that I'm severely underpricing my apt (Hey, dope, did you notice your apartment rented out in, like, an hour?!?!) So after doing some market research, I find out that all the comps in the area are going for $550. Well, now I have a problem. I can't (legally, or morally imo) just raise the rent on my current tenant. Even when their lease runs out, I would be pretty harsh to raise their rent by almost 100%. So in this case, I would talk to him, find out how long he's planning on living there. If it's just the remainder of the year, no problem, I'll raise rent with the next tenant. If he's going to remain long term, I'll have to explain that there will be increases over the next few years (but I wouldn't be able to come anywhere near $250) Now, keep in mind, nowhere in this scenario did a recession come anywhere into the equation. Cause frankly, if all these people in my neighborhood are able to afford rents at that rate, well, why isn't the recession affecting them? My tenant will have to make a decision: either this neighborhood is worth the extra money, or it isn't.
Now, as for Marvel (extracting out the lying aspect of it), what's different than the model I laid out. Well, for one, other than subscribers, they don't have long-term contracts. Now, you could say that they have a bit of a social contract with it's readers, but I would say that's thin. So they can really change thir price at any time. And I wouldn't judge them one bit. (If they jumped to $50 an issue, I would judge them for making a bad business decision, but only if sales fell
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Also, they can't go on a case by case basis as I can do with my tenants. I suppose if I started buying 200 unit apartment buldings, that would become problematic for me too. So they make across the board decisions.
Here's what I suspect is going on: Lately, I've noticed marvel putting a lot of titles out. In fact, at my LCBS, they've been encroaching on what has always seemed to be DC shelf space. This reminds me a lot of the 90s when there were titles for almost everything. So obviously there's a demand. You can see the response here about price increases. People pare down their list to those titles that they absolutely love. And they'll pay the higher price for them. I think Marvel wants a leaner line: less creative talent to pay (or you can pay them more), and less printing costs relative to the profit per issue. What's the drawback of doing this: niche titles are harder to try out. Would the space line have been given a go under a leaner Marvel: probably not. But I've had a thought for a while that I think is in Marvel's plans: I've seen a few good comics "tested" on Marvel Digital, only later to be printed up and sold. I think this is where things like Annihilation, Runaways, Young Avengers will get their start in the future. Just a hunch. If that's really the case, they have work to do on Marvel Digital ( or md, for short
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