How Comic Book Prices Changed Since Amazing Fantasy 15

This content was produced in partnership with AskGamblers.Twelve cents. That's what Amazing Fantasy #15 cost in August 1962, the one where Peter Parker gets bitten. Run it through an inflation calculator and you get about a dollar and a quarter, which these days won't even get you halfway to a new issue of Amazing Spider-Man at your local shop. Meanwhile ask a teenager when they last bought a comic and you'll get a blank look. Ask what they're reading and they'll just hold up their phone.So yeah, price has been the problem for a long time. The weird part is the fix didn't really come from comics. It came from mobile games, from Spotify, from Twitch and Patreon, and (bear with me here) from online casinos, and the publishers more or less copied their homework over about ten years. Here's roughly how it went, including the bit where it all went wrong.2012: Candy Crush and the Free LevelsKing put Candy Crush Saga on iOS on 14th November 2012 and you probably remember how it worked. Play for free for ages, get stuck on some horrible level, and then the game asks very nicely whether you'd like to spend 99 cents to get past it. Loads of people never paid anything at all. King still made ...