Dear Dan Didio

This could be aimed at any publisher of comic books, but since I have grown up with and always had a soft spot for DC Comics, it is being directed at you.
I hope that your sales figures are holding up well through this crushing period of recession? After all, today's new comics are tomorrow's back issues - which is where escapecomics steps in. Truth to tell, this dealer does not buy too many newly published comic books any more and here's why:
Back in the day - well, about 1960 - when American comics began to be widely available in Scotland, I quickly became hooked on them. The US cover price was 10 cents and that worked our at sixpence in British money. In other words, for £1 i could buy 40 comics - that would have cost $4 in the USA. Even though one pound sterling was a lot of money in 1960, the pricing meant that I could build up a nice and fairly complete collection of every title that I liked and even when the price drifted up to 12 then 15 cents it was okay with a keen collector.
Leap forward to the present day and the basic cover price for a comic book is $2.99 which translates at one British chain of comic shops as £2.45 - in other words, even although US inflation since 1960 means that a dollar the is now worth about $7.5 the cover price of comics in the USA has risen 30 times and in the UK 98 times.
Granted the quality of production has greatly improved over the years, and perhaps you print on a better quality of paper, but a thirty fold increase in cover price in 50 years when "real" inflation has only bee 7.5 times?
I don't hold you responsible for the dramatic shift in the exchange rate between the UK and the US (the shift being compounded because air freight is used now instead of sea freight in the sixties) but there is a case for you to answer on your domestic price rocket.
Maybe the ownership of comics publishers being in the hands of gigantic corporations now has some bearing - that would also explain the proliferation of $3.99 comics - after all they will be demanding meaningful profits. But when a product increases in price by four time the national rate of inflation there is something far wrong.
From what I understand, it is not as if the creators have benefitted greatly from the higher cost of comics, although they will benefit when the latest six issues of Character X are turned into a grossly overpriced graphic novel, so we can't point the finger at them.
Time for a rethink dear Dan, why not get back to building your markets on volume - how many young kids are reading comics these days compared to five decades back and how many are being read by adults who were hooked many years ago? Think of the future and get after today's kids and in the process perhaps you will win over some cynical older fans who have pretty well dropped out of your market.