Picking up the pieces
Picking up the pieces |
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Page 29 of 38  Fake advert, 'Learn to Swear' (1991), the likes of which were increasingly popular. Art/script: Viz team. As well as these, Viz inspired comics and magazines that were genuinely new in some senses. Titles for a black readership, for example, became visible for the first time (the most notable were Skank, the humour of which is best described as 'Brixton wide boy', and Africaman, a sort of African Private Eye). Furthermore, there was a significant crossover with the football fanzine scene, with titles like Sweet FA and Red Card developing a new kind of readership. In most cases, these titles were read by people who would not normally pick up a comic at all (something that also applied to a significant degree to Viz) and although their sales remain very small, they are a definite indication that new British comics publishing -such as it is - continues to be orientated towards adults rather than children. In the United States, the crisis in the comics industry was felt, if anything, more keenly than in Britain. As we have seen, the decline in sales after the Code was never halted, and publishers continued to go out of business at an alarming rate. The narrowing of competition meant that after the 1960s, Marvel and DC Comics inherited a greater share of a rapidly shrinking market. Both companies now devoted themselves to what they called 'a period of research and development' - in other words, a desperate hunt for new ideas to keep them afloat. It is not without some justification that historians of American comics refer to the period between the end of the 'Marvel Age' and the start of the specialist fan movement as a 'dark age'. |