Action and adventure
Action and adventure |
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Page 9 of 42  Cover, Look-in (Independent Television, 1971), an anthology marketed as 'The Junior TV Times'. Art: Anon Arguably this situation could have been ameliorated if pay and working conditions for creators had been more reasonable. Unfortunately, however, the same rules applied to adventure comics as to humour. Indeed, if anything, rates of pay were worse on adventure titles because of the extra attention to detail involved: this took time, for which creators were not paid extra. While DC Thomson were able to exploit their non-union policy, so IPC developed a habit of hiring cheap foreign artists to do the work, which only exacerbated the situation.6 Understandably, many creators were worn down by the system in the long run: Frank Hampson, for example, left the industry in disgust when he realized he had no control over his creations, and would not earn royalties from them. He said later 'Dare has been, for me, a long and bitter personal tragedy. For all the underlying problems, adventure had one major advantage over the humour industry. It was more amenable to diversification. This is what saved it from stagnation in the 1960s, and pushed it on to even greater success. In time, the anthologies were joined by an ever-increasing number of titles devoted to a particular sub-genre. |