Ron Catapano of Ron's Comic World in Mount Holly, New Jersey read Kendall Swafford's recent column (see "Talk the Talk, Walk the Walk--Shell Game") and had this to say.

After reading the latest column from Kendall Swafford, I feel obligated to reply since I was the one that complained about the changing comic prices.  Let me answer the two questions posed: A) What the Hell it takes to make some retailers happy and B) "Why did we bother?"

A) If the prices hadn't been raised in the first place it would have made me happy.  Things were already tough before but the business has changed since the prices were raised.  When prices went up it forced many readers to reevaluate how they were spending their money.  Some customers just stopped coming around while others dropped titles that they didn't feel were worth the extra dollar.  I've run into a few of my former regulars and some have gone to an online discounter where they get a discount that I couldn't match and stay in business while several just download them free online from a torrent site.  The odd thing is that whether cheap or even free, all of these guys have reduced the number of titles they're reading.

Putting prices back to where they were is NOT going to magically bring back the lost customers, and it's not going to be enough to make readers that dropped titles suddenly start picking them up again.  To use a really old saying, this is like closing the barn door after the horses have gone.

B) Most retailers complained because it appeared that the price increase at that time would just make an already bad situation worse, which it did.  If they had just raised the price on a handful of popular well produced comics it wouldn't have been such a big deal because the customer would be getting their moneys worth, but raising the price a dollar on so many mid and lower tier books pushed readers away.

But really, when have the publishers actually listened to us anyway?  There's a reason Brian Hibbs calls his column Tilting at Windmills.  Search for my name on this site and you'll see that I've raised my voice more than a few times.  I once spent two years annoying the folks at DC just to try to get them to do a few TPB's that I believed would make the both of us some money.  They were the original Warlord series, Abnett and Lanning's run on Legion of Super Heroes, and the Emperor Joker storyline.  They finally did the Emperor Joker book (after it was no longer relevant to what was happening in Batman and JLA), they're now collecting Warlord but it's in black & white and its only after failing to re-launch the series, and I'm still wondering why no Legion of Super-Heroes.  And while I'm at it, with everything that's gone on in Batman over the last year, why is Prodigal still out of print?

Well, I hope that answers that. I agree with the rest of what was said.  I often have a stack of some "sold out" book on my shelves and considering that my DC orders (and sales) have consistently been larger than my Marvel orders, I've also been curious how Marvel keeps coming out on top of the charts.

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.