Why did American comics always go with the cheapest possible package? Why did they devolve from 64 page anthologies to 32 pages including ads?
I guess the long term answer is ‘sales’ and 'costs'. Cheap funnybooks probably sell better than more expensive ones. The main audience for comics was traditionally kids. Kids generally do not have access to a lot of money. More expensive comics might have meant more profit per unit, but fewer units in sales.
There were occasional thicker comics in the 1940’s, but given that comics started out at 64 pages (and then shrank) there were not a lot of them.
EC comics managed to put together a larger (both in size and in page count) comic by transitioning Mad to a black and white magazine. Warren’s magazines followed a similar format. Later on Marvel ran with magazine sized comics for around ten years. Magazine sized comics never really stuck in the US, except for Mad.
Some of the upstart publishers in the 1960’s went with a larger (more pages) comic for a quarter instead of the then-standard 12 cent comic. Tower Publications did this with T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and I know there were others. If I keep blogging maybe I can document some of them.
Marvel and DC both went to 48 pages (advertised as 52 pages because covers and because business people are deceptive) for a quarter in the early 1970’s. Marvel stuck out the format for maybe a month. DC stuck with it longer and Marvel at 20 cents finally overtook DC in sales for pretty much all eternity.
In the 70’s both DC and Marvel did various oversized things. Marvel had some Warren style magazines, Treasury Editions and Giant-Size squarebound comics which included the wonderfully named Giant Size Man-Thing.
DC had various treasury sized comics, pretty much skipped the Warren style magazines and had various Giant sized comics in the 1970’s. My favorite were the 100 Page Super-Spectaculars, which were awesome comics with generally a regular comics worth of new stuff and tons of reprints. As a kid who obsessed over Steranko’s History of Comics those reprints were a godsend.
On the other hand, those 100 pages were really 96 pages + covers. Business people, as I have mentioned before, are deceptive.
DC premiered their Dollar Comics in the late 1970’s. At the time, proper newsstand magazines like Time or Newsweek sold for around a buck or around 3 times the cost of a regular comic. The Dollar Comics had a lot more pages than a regular comic, 80 at first although this shrank to about 48 over time as inflation took its toll. This was a pretty cool package.
Alas, it was a package doomed to fail. A $1 price point meant that the package would get slimmer and slimmer as time went on. And the reliance on anthologies in the Dollar Comics format made them unpopular in the direct market.
Too bad, it was a cool experiment, and something we will see a few more times at different price points over the next couple of decades.
And, it turns out, the best way to package comics in a thicker and more profitable package in the good ol’ graphic novel. But that’s getting ahead of the game.
