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Interest in Comics Isn’t Fading, But Prices Keep Going Up 💶
I’ve been getting into comics lately. I’ve almost always read books in digital format, as I find it more practical to read a big book that way.
Reading a comic on a Kindle, though, really loses a lot of its appeal. If you’re going to read a graphic novel, either you go for the paper version (quality paper to make the colours pop) or you read it on a tablet — in my case an iPad Pro 12.9-inch.
Either way, a standard Franco-Belgian comic costs €15, a comics issue (let’s not get into the debate about the differences 😅) will cost about the same for triple the pages. Then there’s manga, which is a bit of a separate category — admittedly black and white (OK, there are black-and-white comics too, but they’re the exception) — and it comes in at €7.
First observation: Franco-Belgian comics aren’t within everyone’s budget. You get more for your money with two mangas or one comic book at the same price — more pages (which doesn’t necessarily mean more reading time).
Prices are going up due to rising raw material costs. You might think the obvious solution is to go digital — but no, the digital offering is simply terrible: either too expensive, or with almost no interesting titles available.
Rant Time
Take Iznéo, the online comic reading service. At first glance, the catalogue looks enormous — and it is. So you think, sure, I’m happy to pay €10 a month to read these comics. But once you subscribe, you realise that 3/4 of the catalogue isn’t actually included in the subscription — you’re back to paying at the till.
This kind of practice drives me mad. I understand the service may not have the rights to include everything in a subscription deal, but at the very least, be upfront about the catalogue from the start. It’s misleading advertising — they make you think you’ll have access to the full catalogue, and then once you’ve signed up, they’re banking on you being too lazy to cancel.
Imagine if Netflix did the same thing. You think you can watch a series, but no — you have to pay on top of your subscription…
What Does the Future Hold?
There’s a real market for digital comics, even if it’s still in its infancy. How many of us would be willing to pay to rent a digital comic? How many of us love the idea of collecting books on shelves?
With the paper shortage, the best response publishers can give is to accept that their works are available online — either through a subscription model (rental) or at reasonable purchase prices (less than half the print price).
Publishers complain about falling sales, particularly in the comics genre, but if comics were accessible through platforms like Iznéo, they could get much faster feedback on what readers are actually interested in, without taking on too much risk. The advantage of these platforms is also the ability to negotiate availability over a set period — so the risk is controlled, since when the deal expires the platform has to renegotiate rights.
