I've never paid more than cover price for a title that is less than a year old, not matter how hot the storyline or character is.  I have no problem with selling titles at retail, if they are relatively recent and still in newsstand condition.  Then again, I grew up with newsstand prices between 25 cents and 50 cents, then Direct Market prices between 75 cents and a buck fifty, for Baxter paper.  Anything more than that was a Prestige Format, squarebound or back issue with historical and collector value.  In no way, shape or form are modern comics within my price range, as a child or teen.  Not even adjusting for inflation.  I could find better toy values or just snacks.

I grew up in a household where money was usually tight and you either had to go out and earn money, or wait for birthdays and Christmas and always kept my financial limits in mind.

Until I was in my 20s and had easy credit, with a credit card and financed my comic collecting habit with debt.  That was fine while I was in the military and could mostly pay off my balances, but not so much when I left and was underpaid, for a decade.  Then, I was giving up more and more of my income to pay off the debt (the interest, mostly).  I've only been debt free in the last decade.

Too much is when you don't have the cash in pocket and have real necessities to take care of.

Adding to my earlier reply: I wasn't in love with Shadow Glass, but Aly Fell wrote and drew that in 2016 and the sample above is from this year and it looks a lot better. (Art in Shadow Glass was not terrible, but it was their first work in comics and it shows, but there are more experienced artists who do worse work.)

it seems like the 'regular' price now for Marvel and DC in the US is $3.99.. but DC mostly does a cardstock cover version for $4.99 for every issue.   anything special or slightly larger is more... like I'm the sucker that paid $9.99 for the Zero hour anniversary special (I had to.. Kyle back drawn by Banks!)

I did like to support monthly comics at one point, but then I had to be realistic: buying the 6-issue trade with a *complete* story was the logical choice.

Why would I pay nearly four or five quid for ONE comic, which contains one-sixth of a story, when I could just wait for the trade? If I buy the six issues individually, that’s nearly 30 quid, give or take. But a trade may cost between £14 and £18. One has to save money.

I’ve posted about this before, but although I wasn’t timing myself with a stopwatch, reading an old comic might have taken half an hour. Reading, say, a 1980s issue of Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man might take 20-30 minutes because the story was in-depth (and, unlike a lot of today’s comics, thought bubbles were a thing), but then, if you were so inclined, you could read “Stan’s Soapbox” and “Bullpen Bulletins”. It did feel like value for money.

But if I were to pick up a Marvel title today, which may be part 1 of 6, I am gonna probably have read it in 12-15 minutes. 

I have also posted this previously, but I don’t get the aversion to thought bubbles today. Now, yes, one might be able to find cases of redundancy, e.g. Superman thinking something that we already know (“No time for introspection about my date with Lois, Metallo is attacking the Daily Planet building”), but there were also times when thought bubbles served a purpose. I can’t remember the exact situation, but there was an early Spidey tale where one of Jameson’s thought bubbles conveyed his thought that he was ripping Peter Parker off (“I could charge double for these photos, but he doesn’t know that because he’s a fool”). In that same story, I think Parker had a thought of his own (“It’s not much, but I feel bad for deceiving Jameson, so I’ll take it”). There’s a lot of paraphrasing I’m doing, but I am thinking about things like that.

So while some have said thought bubbles were redundant, not all were. A thought bubble conveying what we already know might have seemed redundant, but there were quite a few that didn’t. Parker thinking about how cold Jameson was might be an example. It also makes sense to have them at times. We all may talk to ourselves at times, e.g. I might say, “I don’t know what’s wrong with this cooker, it’s not cooking properly at all.” But the majority of the time, it’d be thoughts rather than speech. Spidey is more likely to think about his exam the next day while web-slinging, which can be conveyed by a thought bubble, than he is to say it out loud.

On another note, I hate that some comics got rid of captions like this:






I am not advocating for thought bubbles and captions simply to pad out a story. Personally, I felt they were overused during the Claremont/Byrne X-Men run. And I know things have changed, I realise that comics are a niche product now - and I am absolutely not saying a business could make a profit by selling at old prices (everything goes up, look at a pint of milk now). I’m merely stating that an old comic, with its thought bubbles and captions, took longer to read than a modern comic which has done away with those things.

I am referring to Marvel and DC, by the way, while I do read other publishers, I have no idea if thought bubbles and captions are widely used elsewhere.