Welcome to the third edition of “How to Get Kids to Read Comics Again”.

Today, we’ll be talking about price. You see, kids simply cannot afford to buy comics because they’re too expensive. A comic today is anywhere from 2.99 to 4.99 (graphic novels are far higher, obviously) and they’ll probably be getting worse thanks to the fact that our economy is in free fall thanks to free market capitalist assholes operating in George Bush’s deregulated nightmare version of America.

But inflation isn’t the reason you see prices of comics so high. If that were the case, comics would all still be $1.50. Seriously. I checked it out. Action Comics #1 had a cover price of 10 cents in 1938. Adjusting for inflation in today’s dollars, that same comic hitting the stands today would be a whopping $1.43. So why are comics easily more than twice that?

There’s a number of reasons for it and I can guarantee kids don’t care about any of them.

For one, you’re looking at better printing on better paper with better color. Which is great for collectors and artists and nerds like us willing to shell out the cash, but for a ten year old kid who has to scrape the bottom of his piggy bank to afford the latest adventure of Spider-man, I can guarantee four-color on newsprint is more than enough. I’m not saying comics should all go back to the stone ages, but it’s obvious that four-color newsprint is a lot cheaper and is more than capable of handling the medium. Why don’t the big publishers take their kids lines, cut the price in half by saving on printing costs (and expanding the print run for a bulk discount, which we’ll talk about later) and saturate the market with cheap comics.

Drop the price of new Batman and Spider-man series that are aimed at 10 year olds and two things will happen. One, collectors, artists and nerds like us will start collecting these, too and two, suddenly two comics for the price of a pack of Pokemon cards sounds a lot more attractive than 3/5ths of a comic. I owned a store for a long time. Kids that literally have to find their money to earn it want the most entertainment for their dollar and a box of Hero-clix or a pack of Yu-gi-oh cards will provide them with way more than a comic. But if suddenly $3 can get them two comics or more, you’re competing a whole lot better in that market.

The next piece of this is expanding print runs. In previous columns, we’ve already talked about the need to get comics back on grocery store shelves, in newsstands and anywhere else you can. This would help bring the cost down. It’s simple economics, the more you’re printing and selling, the less your costs are.

The last cost-cutting measure?  Don’t hire super-star artists.  Guys like Jim Lee and Humberto Ramos and Ryan Ottley deserve what you pay them.  Ron Lim and Rob Liefield?  Not so much.  Get those guys to do these books at minimum rates .  Or you could get sequential art students to do it.  Hell, it would probably be better looking than Ron Lim and Rob Liefield.

Essentially, the point of today’s column is this: Get comics back down to today’s equivalent of a dime and make it affordable for kids to read as many comics as they want. Granted, the profit margin might not be higher on those books, but as they get older and get jobs, they’ll be blowing $20-$50 every week on comics just like the rest of us.

(Click here to read all of the previous columns in this series.)