My pal Gary Sassaman has another installment up of his series, "Tales From My Spinner Rack!" In it, Gary reminisces about comic books he collected avidly when he was a kid and as I was a kid at roughly the same time collecting the same comics, his pieces strike a fine chord with me.
This time out, Gary discusses "The 25-Cent War," a moment in 1971 when it was necessary for DC and Marvel to raise their cover prices. They'd been offering 32-page comics for fifteen cents and with this increase, through some matter of possibly-illegal collusion, they both went to 48-page comics for 25 cents…but in Marvel's case, not for long. After one month, Marvel switched back to the 32-page format offering it with a cover price of twenty cents — a chess move which practically destroyed DC.
As some of you know, while I loved the content of a lot of DC Comics from this period, I thought the management of the company was totally inept. Their 48-page format comics were part new, part reprints and the readers hated the mix. Marvel, meanwhile, was giving their wholesalers and retailers a better deal on the 20-cent comics and it was all downhill for DC for several years after that, even after they gave up and went to twenty cents too. Things weren't helped by DC's tendency to give up on new products if the first or second issues didn't sell, and by a lot of bad, cluttered covers and…well, there were other missteps.
This is all my opinion, not Gary's…but you can see what he had to say about it all when you enjoy the latest edition of "Tales From My Spinner Rack!" Enjoy…