DC Executive To Marvel: You’re Liars. Oh Snap!
Last year both DC and Marvel announced that they were scaling back prices from $3.99 to $2.99 on their funny books. The Marvel announcement came right after the DC announcement, and many thought they were piggybacking the idea. And while DC seemed to come through with it, Marvel didn’t drop their prices in the sense that they intimated they would. Last weekend, this led to DC executive Eddie Berganza calling Marvel a pack of liars.
I love a good comic executive throwdown.
When Eddie Berganza was asked if DC was better than Marvel at C2E2 Brightest Day panel last weekend, dude responded:
“Let’s put it this way…we lowered our prices and didn’t lie about it.”
Shots fired! Robot 6 has the backstory for those not in the know.
You might recall the last time price cuts became a topic for discussion at a Reed Exhibitions comic convention. Back at October’s New York Comic Con, DC announced the initiative that would come to be known as “holding the line at $2.99,” dropping co-features (and two story pages) from all of its ongoing series and pricing them all at $2.99 rather than the then-increasingly-customary $3.99. Not even an hour later, Marvel Senior VP-Sales & Circulation David Gabriel announced that Marvel would be cutting prices too, with new books no longer launching at $3.99 as of January 2011. Though few details were forthcoming, the announcement piggybacked on DC’s in such a way as to lead to “DC and Marvel both cut prices”-style headlines (see here and here for examples). But the price cuts many believed were forthcoming on all new Marvel titles largely failed to materialize, with the new $2.99 titles located almost entirely in the limited-series portion of the company’s offerings. This in turn led Marvel’s then-VP-Executive Editor Tom Brevoort to claim that Gabriel’s statement (and, by extension, seemingly corroborative follow-ups at NYCC by Brevoort and Marvel PR guru Arune Singh) had been “misreported or misconstrued,” which frankly was kind of a stretch given the abundance of comics press outlets who reported the story in more or less exactly the same way.
Outstanding. I was never aware of the clarification that Brevoort may regarding the pricing. I just stared at the cover prices recently and called them a pack of fucking liars. Sure maybe they didn’t lie, but they sure pulled some Obi-Wan Kenobi fucking equivocating. Daps to Berganza for calling them out, and double-daps for them actually their price.
Now if only 80% of my pull-list wasn’t Marvel.
Fuck.