Watssit Worth?

Last weekend I bought a new smart phone – the Motorola Droid X. One of the more interesting apps that I’ve downloaded is an Inflation Calculator. Playing around with it, I plugged in the sales price of comic books from the 1950s, ten cents, and learned that a dime then is worth about 0.91 cents now.

Comic books in 2010 sell for as much as $3.99 (DC recently lowered their prices to $2.99) which in 1950, was worth about 0.44 cents – or for the price of one comic book today, you could have purchased the equivalent of four comic books in 1950.

However, all things considered, would I really want to read those comic books from 1950? As historical curiosities, they are interesting, but I wouldn’t want to buy or read any of them on a month to month basis, despite the fact that comic books (in terms of page length) were more like “books” and a lot less like the pamphlets that I pick up once a month at the comic book store.

A fairer comparison, in terms of format – and quality – would be with 1986, the year I started to buy and read comic books on a regular basis. $3.99 was worth about $2 in 1986, which would have let me buy two comic books (pricing varied between 0.75 cents and $1) with as much as two quarters left over to spend at the arcade, or a Big Gulp at 7-11, but not both.

The comic books were printed on newsprint, but otherwise, there were no significant differences in the artistic or written quality of the comic books that I enjoyed then and now.

The bad ones still suck for pretty much the same reasons now as they did then: artwork that looks like a photocopy of a photocopy of a rejected John Byrne page for The Uncanny X-men, and, well, the less said about the writing, the better.

And as for good comic books, they are every bit as good now as they were back then. However, nobody has really brought any radically new narrative, visual, or thematic treatments to the table since Frank Miller, Alan Moore (working with artists Stephen R. Bissette, John Totleben, Rick Veitch, et al), and Dave Sim were doing their ground-breaking work on titles like Batman: Year One, Swamp Thing, and Cerebus.

So it really does beg the question: is the fancier paper really worth the extra buck or two?