Sorry, Marvel, but $3.99 is the price point that broke my back...

I really wanted to buy the new all-female team X-Men title from the start, but $3.99 a pop is way too much to pay for a 22-page comic book.

In fairness to Marvel, I have paid the equivalent of eight dollars for a brand-new printed comic.  As you know, I live in Japan and sometimes imported comics show up at bookstores with those kinds of mark-ups.  I've bought comics for around five dollars at places like Blister.  Scarcity and desperation played a role in my acceptance of those higher prices.

But now I find new comics readily available online, and vast back catalogs opening up there as well.  After having spent a lot of money at Comixology and Dark Horse Digital, my price expectations are coming back down to earth.

It's relative to the package you get, as well.  I'm pretty sure Woods's Conan the Barbarian came out at $3.50, which is still too expensive (and I bought those issues for more in yen), but the first story arc has the draw of Becky Cloonan artwork, plus some added value with the little Robert Howard comic strip and letter pages.  Also, the print versions have a heftier feel than anything Marvel puts out and that makes higher prices a little easier to take.  Now available digitally at a reduced price $2.99 each, they're still a bit of a wallet-strain, but Dark Horse has bundled three issues each into quite economical $4.99 packages.  Customer relief!

Publishers frequently offer titles for .99 on Comixology, $1.99 is my favored "regular" point, and I can do $2.99 if it's really something special.  But $3.99?  For 22 pages?  Well, most of us want things we can't have and so we make choices.  For me, I also think it would be nice if Ferrari sold their cars for a dollar and we could all zoom around.  But they don't (because they wouldn't be in business very long if they did something that stupid), so we don't.  And while their comics certainly aren't as expensive to make as elite sports cars, Marvel, like Ferrari, knows what the market will bear and right now, that's $3.99 for most people not named Joel Bryan.  Pricing a slender comic book this high makes my choice pretty easy.  I still want to read this, but like the thrifty shopper I've become, I'll wait for a sale or the collection and buy that instead.

Everything I've bought lately has been from Comixology...

As we've discussed, your choices for print versions of your favorite American mainstream and smaller-press comics in Japan are very limited.  As in almost non-existent.  You can find some online retailers and pay massive shipping costs or you can buy digitally.  The latter is what I've settled on doing through Comixology and, to a lesser extent, the also nifty Dark Horse online store.

While I don't mean to shill for Comixology-- not being able to download your comics to read them offline is a major irritant I have with them, after all-- or for Dark Horse-- same deal-- as a comic fan in Japan, those are really the only games in town.  Strangely enough, after years of accumulating actual hold-in-your-hand comic magazines stored in the classic "longbox," I now have the most extensive comic book collection of my life in digital form.  I own comics I could only dream about having-- key books from the Golden Age, almost three dozen Fantastic Fours by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, complete runs of favorite titles from my childhood and teenage years plus a scattering of random choices from some newer offerings. And even though I'm not a supporter of what Marvel and DC are doing these days, I am buying a few individual issues just to keep up with developments or because I like a particular character or other.

Dani Moonstar and Katana, I'm looking at you!

I haven't spent as much money at Dark Horse, but there's no reason for that beyond my obsession with books like Kamandi and The Walking Dead, which you can only buy from Comixology.  Eventually I'll hit Dark Horse up for all the Hellboy and Conan titles they carry, plus those Creepy and Eerie collections I love.  In the meantime, Comixology also offers IDW and Fantagraphics products, Image, The Rude Dude Productions Nexus issues and their new self-submission titles, some of which are worth reading.

If you're living here in Japan and you're interested, you need to check out both Comixology and Dark Horse.