cost of comic books

I’m really annoyed by how much comic books cost. Depending on the issue comics can cost up to 3 to 4 dollars which is about a third or a half of the cost of a paperback book or a dollar or two less than a wired or national geographic magazine. Now I usually didn’t mind having to pay this much for comic, but as of late I noticed that comics seem to also have less and less pages while increasing ads and having things like thicker pages and a thicker cover, and  filling the issue with more padding  with each issue. As a comic book fan this pretty much makes me feel like I’m getting ripped off.  There really isn’t a reason for doing this aside for only trying to make the customers buy more comics.  The comic book industry could easily lower the price of comics while increasing the amount of fans by lowering the quality of the materials used. It doesn’t have to be the same quality as comics in the 30s which were almost like newspapers, but just enough so that they looked almost like they did in the mid to late 90s. And charge only two dollars or at most $2.50. However the companies running the comic book probably would still raise the price anyway.