Before anyone else says it, I will: There's no inherent reason creator-owned contracts HAVE to be complicated. But Marvel's still putting together a new deal, and DC's is very complex. It just happens to work that way at both companies.

Best,
Stuart

Wrong. THE SOURCE routinely tops a 250-page count with a $2.95 cover price. I am holding in my hands THE SOURCE #133 (October 2000). Cover price: $2.95. Page count: 296.

I'm unfamiliar with The Source. What's its content? What percentage of its content is ads?

If it's one of those computer-buyer mags, that's an entirely different animal, more akin to what CBG was back in the '70s and '80s (a minimum of editorial content wrapped around ads; the ads are the thing people actually buy the mag for) than to a typical mass-market mag like People, Time or Glamour.

Oh--one other question: What percentage of The Source is printed in color? If it's completely black-and-white (something that's very rare in modern magazine publishing) then, again, we're dealing with a different animal.

The Source is a hip-hop culture mag. It does indeed have a cover price of under $3.

Kind of makes your claims about "Nobody, not even ad-supported mags, charges only $2.95 for a 250-page package" and "Anything that costs under $3 has a page count in the 100 range, not the 250 range" look like the rantings of someone who doesn't know what they're talking about, doesn't it?

THE SOURCE sells more copies on the newsstand than any other pop music magazine, including ROLLING STONE. How on Earth could you not be aware of it?

*Every page* is full color. Every page is glossy.

Ads? I'm not going to sit here and count how many of the 296 pages in this issue are ads. My eyeball estimate is 50%.

By the way: I also have on hand the November 2000 issue of VIBE. Cover price $2.99. 186 pages. Completely full-color. Compeletly glossy. Its content is hipo-hop/R+b/'urban lifestyle.' Percentage of ads looks to be 50% or so.

Of course, it couldn't be that I was making a generalized rule-of-thumb, on the same order as "80% of a newsstand-distributed comic title's sales are in the direct market," could it?

Because then this would simply be more nit-picking (or should that be "Nat-picking") as usual?

We all could pick out individual titles that have more than 80% of their sales in the DM, and some that have less than 80% of their sales in the DM, but that wouldn't make the 80% rule-of-thumb wrong, would it? Just indicate that there are exceptions to it.

Just as there are exceptions to the page count/price rule-of-thumb I stated (perhaps in too strong a fashion) above.

Pat, you posted false information. Reading your mind as to why you posted that false information is beyond my abilities. But seeing you start casting around for excuses to exclude The Source from consideration does provide a clue. Only once we have information that the magazine violates your original statement and even your sliding goalposts does this "rule-of-thumb" argument appear.

So despite Pat's protestations, such magazines exist. However, that doesn't make it easy to put comics in that format; trying to justify printing, distribution, and high creative costs seems difficult. It seems hard to hit both sales figures and demographics which would make the book sufficiently attractive to advertisers.
But it would be interesting to see someone like the folks behind The Source give it a try.

Nat:

Someday you'll discover that not every misstatement is a deliberate lie. Nor is every rhetorical device--such as a generalization or a rule-of-thumb or even hyperbole--a lie, despite not being strictly "true".

When you do, you'll get along a lot better in the world.