Bleeding Cool is reporting that in May Marvel Comics is going to try out the current page/price model of DC Comics, twenty pages for $2.99.
DC put the policy into place at the beginning of January as a way to keep titles at the familiar $2.99 price point, while keeping costs down enough to afford it after both companies had been experimenting with the $3.99 price per issue. DC had been including backup stories to accompany that added dollar, Marvel….has about a fifty-fifty split between books priced $2.99 and books priced $3.99, with equal page counts in most cases.
According to the report, Marvel will be experimenting with different page counts, but all at the $2.99 price. And apparently if they do cut down pages per issue, the company is also looking at potentially moving books to thirteen issues a year instead of twelve.
Of course, this is just rumors, and we won’t know anything until either Marvel says as much, or if the May Previews come out and the price is listed there. I’d be happy with the price cut, though. In my opinion unless you’ve got extra pages you can’t really justify $3.99 for a comic. Yes, I buy plenty of them (thanks Marvel….and DC before this month), but I’d probably read more issues if they were cheaper. I dropped Secret Avengers last week for questionable quality at an increased price point, while JSA All Stars was only saved because the price dropped.
