"Let's put it this way...we lowered our prices and didn't lie about it."

--DC Comics Executive Editor Eddie Berganza at C2E2's "Brightest Day" panel this weekend, responding to a fan who asked if DC was better than Marvel.

You might recall the last time price cuts became a topic for discussion at a Reed Exhibitions comic convention. Back at October's New York Comic Con, DC announced the initiative that would come to be known as "holding the line at $2.99," dropping co-features (and two story pages) from all of its ongoing series and pricing them all at $2.99 rather than the then-increasingly-customary $3.99. Not even an hour later, Marvel Senior VP-Sales & Circulation David Gabriel announced that Marvel would be cutting prices too, with new books no longer launching at $3.99 as of January 2011. Though few details were forthcoming, the announcement piggybacked on DC's in such a way as to lead to "DC and Marvel both cut prices"-style headlines (see here and here for examples). But the price cuts many believed were forthcoming on all new Marvel titles largely failed to materialize, with the new $2.99 titles located almost entirely in the limited-series portion of the company's offerings. This in turn led Marvel's then-VP-Executive Editor Tom Brevoort to claim that Gabriel's statement (and, by extension, seemingly corroborative follow-ups at NYCC by Brevoort and Marvel PR guru Arune Singh) had been "misreported or misconstrued," which frankly was kind of a stretch given the abundance of comics press outlets who reported the story in more or less exactly the same way. And thus you get Berganza's pointed pushback.

Of course, Brevoort isn't the sort to take this lying down. When asked about Berganza's comments on his Formspring account, here's how Marvel's Senior Vice President of Publishing responded:

No, we didn't lie about it. We've been offering more new titles at $2.99, and the $3.99 books stay where they are--we never said any different. (Also, given the pasting they took in dollar share in January and February, much of which was a result of their price reduction, I'd be surprised if they hold to it for the entire year as they said they would. I'm guessing that you'll see more $3.99 DC books around September.)

Ah, comics: From debates about price points to figuring out whether the Hulk is really "the strongest one there is," you wouldn't be the same without semantics.