Picking up the pieces
Picking up the pieces |
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Page 2 of 38  Word-balloon from Judge Dredd/Lawman of the Future (Fleetway, 1995). Script: John Wagner. A typical greeting from the hardest man in British comics. In Britain, the rot was quick to set in. The humour industry got stale due to over-production: the great comics of the Reid/Baxendale era had given rise to a plethora of pale imitations, and the glut inevitably meant mergers (Buster with Cor!!, Sparky with Topper, Whoopee! with Whizzer and Chips and so on). Even The Dandy and The Beano, which continued to do well commercially, lost their spark. The adventure genre also ran into problems: its main subject matter, the Second World War, was receding into history, and young readers found more recent wars less interesting (Battle attempted a strip about The Falklands, but it was not popular). Here too the way of death for many comics was to merge: Tiger with The Eagle, Lion with Valiant, Hotspur with Victor, etcetera. Finally, the British girls' comics either disappeared, or turned themselves into female-interest magazines: as we have seen, heirs to the tradition included Blue Jeans and My Guy (glossy, sexually aware publications designed for a teen market). With this alarming background in mind, British publishers were forced to try other strategies to pick up the pieces. Occasionally - very occasionally - they were successful, and there were individual comics in the period from 1970 to the present that managed to buck the downward trend. After all, there were numerically more newsagents than ever before, and they still represented potentially a very profitable network. If there was to be any chance of exploiting it, publishers could no longer rely on old formulas. As a result, they tended to take two paths: one was to 'tie in' new comics with other media (movies, TV shows, computer games, even the toy industry), and the other was to attempt to open up new audiences among older (teenage and adult) readers.  Panel from The Ren and Stimpy Show (Marvel Comics, 1993). Art: Mike Kazaleh. Script: Dan Slott. |