Rick Newman of Pet Shop Comics & Collectibles in Louisville, Kentucky read the first part of the Dan Buckley interview (see "Interview with Marvel Publisher Dan Buckley") and had this to say.

Dan Buckley just doesn't get it!  He should be employed as a politician and not a publisher!  Not only is the 4 bucks-a-pop price point way overpriced but that price is forcing more and more customers to give up comic books altogether.

There is an absolute disconnect with reality amongst the comic industry and the "real" world!  The truth is, these guys who are in charge are NOT wise business people, and they are the "Fathers of the Ruin" of this grand business!  

Comic sales are "soft," partially because the overall content is CRAP at an extortive price.  Artists and writers are treated like "Rock Stars."  In most cases, you could totally remove the logo of the title character and replace it with "name of writer or artist."  Are the comic book companies selling comics that are based on the character/concepts, or are they selling the writers/artists?  Each writer seems to want to put their own "stamp" on the character that they're writing by re-imagining core concepts of the character.  In the process, they seem to have little or no respect for the founding concepts that the character was based upon!  They treat someone else's great character with total disrespect!  Comic books only exist today because of the work of those who came before!

Then there's the matter of miniseries.  All the miniseries does is to teach the comic book customer to purchase comics for a limited time and not for the long haul.  This may bring profits over the short term, but invariably it leads to declining sales over the long haul.  Customers have learned the practice (as taught by the publishers themselves) to only buy 3-5 comics of a character per year rather than 12 over a year!  Either that or wait for a ONE TIME BUY of a trade paperback!  Meanwhile, the publishers hold the comic book shops hostage, cranking out way too many titles each month to a contracting market!  But no, we're supposed to believe that the industry is in good shape, while the evidence is overwhelming to the contrary!

If the publishers really want to fix this mess, they would stop treating artists and writers like Messiahs.  They would have miniseries inside of the core titles and not try to extort their customers, both wholesale and retail.  They would put real businessmen in charge of the business instead of old "Peter Principle" artists.  They would try to increase circulation by lowering the cover price, therefore increasing advertising dollars.  For example, why not reprint every title in a company's history, starting from day one, for a buck?   The costs would be limited to the costs of printing, but the advertising dollars would be more than sustaining, because the material is already paid for!  DC has seventy-five years of material PLUS all of the material from the companies they've swallowed over the years.  Marvel has seventy years of material.  That's revenue just waiting to be tapped into in a way that would accessible to readers of every age across the spectrum!

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.