Picking up the pieces
Picking up the pieces |
|
Page 5 of 38  Cover, Action (Fleetway, 1976) Art: Anon. A precursor to 2000AD that was so subversive and violent that it had to be censored. In spite of the sporadic victories of publishing for the crossover market, it was, and is, a strategy that has natural limitations. The comics produced in this way rarely garner a readership on their own merits, and thus do not develop personalities of their own, or any sense of 'reader loyalty' in the traditional fashion. They tend not to last long. Of more interest to us here were those titles introduced with new markets in mind, which at least represented the comics industry taking a proactive role. Some publishers in Britain, in particular, decided to try to appeal to older readers. They gambled that the teenage and twenty-something market had more disposable income than children, and that therefore prices could be raised in the hope that the effects of falling circulations could be combatted (at least to some extent). This entailed getting away from traditional subject matter, and adding more sophisticated material -both in terms of storytelling and artwork. Concomitantly, it also meant taking more care over presentation and packaging, and this heralded a move away from the traditional newsprint comics in favour of more glossy magazine formats. In terms of the British industry, there were three news-stand comics that were outstanding in the post-19 60s period, either because of their sustained commercial success, aesthetic style, or influence on other comics: 2000AD (IPC/Fleetway, 1977), Deadline (Tom Astor, 1988) and Viz (House of Viz, 1979) each of which generated characters that were equally as ingenious as any produced by the medium in the past.6 The three contradicted the economic trend for different reasons, though they had definite similarities: each was an anthology; each was designed for an older readership; each would increasingly distance itself from its origins in comics in favour of being thought of as a magazine; and each was influenced to a degree by the punk movement of the late 1970s. |