There’s a difference between comic books and graphic novels.
Comic books are still approximately 20 pages long and currently cost about $4 apiece. Often, a complete story requires several issues of comics to tell it from start to finish. If a storyline is deemed to be successful, a number of issues may be collected together and published as an anthology, with a new cover on heavier stock.
A graphic novel is a longer story, usually original (ie never having appeared previously in any comic series) and published on stock similar to what is used for an Anthology.
dear be-,
re: “A graphic novel is a longer story, usually original (ie never having appeared previously in any comic series) and published on stock similar to what is used for an Anthology.”
That still doesn’t rate for them to be as expensive as they are, even for ones that have had their run as a ‘new not published’ story, i.e., ‘ghost’, or, ‘femme noir’, which are in the 20 dollar ON EBAY!!
There is, and yet there isn't.
When I was of comic-book-reading age* in my tweens and early teens (the early 1980s), comic books were short magazines of 20-odd pages (not counting ads), in which storylines generally carried over multiple issues but rarely more than two, or on the outside three.
In recent years, while the physical medium hasn't changed (it's still a magazine of 20-odd pages), the stories have become longer and more complex. They span half a dozen or more issues, and then later get republished in a single trade paperback as a graphic novel.
Obviously the comic publishers have realized there's more than one potential market for the same story.
—————
*Not that I ever really outgrew them, I mean . . .