>>94145456DC's problem right now is that they've spent years keeping prices low, but underlying costs continue to rise. They'll never go down; nobody's using paper any more, for one thing, so there's less being made and what is being made costs more because it no longer has the same economies of scale.
If you go back and look at the average top 300 price for the last 30 years it's (adjusted to 2017) around $4. But DC can't sell comics at $4 (with some exceptions, like Batman), because they've trained their readership to expect cheaper cover prices, and they've come to have readers who may buy a dozen books a month but resent the price increase of even one of them.
Even worse, the comics they have that do sell well - like Batman - are resistant to double shipping, suffering regular sales drops on the second book of the month, unlike competitor titles like ASM, which sells fewer, but usually consistently, per issue. Again, this is a problem peculiar to DC - and it's not one of poorfags/richfags, but attitude. DC knows that most of their readership are older white males with relatively high levels of free capital (cash in pocket), even though they may have families etc. But these readers have been trained to accept lower prices, single shipping, and the kind of easy, lowbrow schlock that all comics have slowly become; they won't accept anything else but retreads of better comics published decades ago.
The headline is wrong, but the sentiment is correct: comics are fucked without fresh audiences, and as long as there are whiny babies like this fuckin thread is full of buying comics, publishers have a huge problem attracting new readers. Thing is, as these older readers die off, they each take a considerable chunk of the market with them, and they're not being replaced - or DC's market share wouldn't have shrunk so drastically in recent years while Marvel's - home of the SJW - has stayed static or even risen.
Guess what DC are planning...
