The Price Of Liberty Hit By Inflation With Kurt Busiek & James W. Fry

Posted in: Comics | Tagged: about comics, Eclipse Comics, inflation, James W. Fry, kurt busiek, nat gertler, The Liberty Project

The Price Of Liberty Hit By Inflation With Kurt Busiek & James W. Fry

The Liberty Project by Kurt Busiek and James W. Fry is finally hit by inflation. But only a little bit...

Published Mon, 18 May 2026 09:57:10 -0500
by Rich Johnston
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Article Summary

• Kurt Busiek and James W. Fry’s The Liberty Project returns to the spotlight as About Comics finally raises its long-frozen price.
• Originally published by Eclipse in 1987, The Liberty Project follows super-criminals working for the U.S. government for parole.
• After Eclipse folded, Kurt Busiek’s The Liberty Project was preserved by Nat Gertler and kept in print through About Comics.
• About Comics lifts the collection from $11.95 to $15.99, still well below the roughly $21 inflation-adjusted 2003 price.

The Liberty Project by Kurt Busiek and James W. Fry was a superhero comic book originally published by Eclipse Comics in 1987 about a group of super-powered criminals working for the U.S. government in exchange for the possibility of early parole. Eclipse went bankrupt, the comic book disappeared and eventually, The Liberty Project and was rescued by the one-man comic book archival superhero himself, Nat Gertler of About Comics. But even a superman like Nat has to succumb to an even greater power, that of inflation.

He writes, "When About Comics first published the collection of Kurt Busiek and James W. Fry's The Liberty Project, we priced it at $11.95. That seemed quite a fine, fair price for a black and white collection of eight issues about a group of supervillains forced by the government to work as a team of heroes. But that was 2003. Olivia Rodrigo had just been born, America had never had a Black president, and we weren't talking about "cinematic universes." Time passed. Printing technology changed, and the book was kept in print that way. We faced the ice bucket challenge, toilet paper shortages, and the near-death of blogging. We learned How I Met Your Mother and not to trust messages from relatives asking us to pay bail fees in bitcoin. Thunderbolts, the other villain-based hero team that Busiek co-created, got turned into a movie*. And we had inflation, cumulatively lots of inflation, with the prices of everything but NFT apes being far higher than they once were. And through all this, out of some combination of a desire to provide our fans with a great deal and sheer laziness, the price of the The Liberty Project collection was kept at a mere $11.95. Well, those days are over, and the future has begun. More importantly, we want to continue making money. As such, we've just raised the price of this volume. Did we raise it to the $21 that the inflation calculator tells us we should've to match that 2003 price? No! The book carries a list price of $15.99, and is available primarily through Amazon, both in the US and in lands beyond (at similar prices in local currency, of course.)"

About Comics has been publishing comics without any venture capitalists trying to buy them out for over a quarter century. *Asterisk

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