Last week, I was contacted by two newspapers, the Sunday Times and the Independent on Sunday, to offer my views on the state of the British comic industry. Specifically, comics on sale in UK newsagents.
The requests were prompted by the disappointing ABC figures for The Dandy, which, as we previously reported, is now selling around 7,448 copies a week.
The Sunday Times published its feature on 11th September - apparently, only in its Scottish edition - and the IoS will run its story later this month.
If there's an online version of the ST feature, which was written by Marc Horne, it must be behind the newspaper's paywall, but Deadline News has pretty much lifted the entire piece for its site and published a similar article here ("Desperate Dandy: comic’s celebrity relaunch 'backfired'"), which includes some of my comments and those of Kid Robson, minus a response from Dandy artist and British comics expert Lew Stringer.
Commenting on the sales figures, a spokesperson for DC Thomson, who publish The Dandy described them as "disappointing.
"There is no getting away from that," they acknowledged, but pointed to success elsewhere for their comics titles.
“The Dandy is the one blot on an otherwise quite successful period for us," the spokesperson added. "We will be taking steps to address that, but we are not looking at radical surgery.”
Needless to say, the coverage and subsequent online posts by Dandy artist and re-designer Jamie Smart in defence of the comic (here and here) have provoked some fierce debate - but in addition, a very measured and useful analysis of many of the problems besetting the British comics industry by Lew Stringer, in the wider context of declining magazine and newspaper sales. You can read that in full on his blog, but he rightly points to an overall decline in print sales of magazines and newspapers.
(Despite print's decline, sales of news stand comics continues to be fairly robust and is not as bad as some other sectors).
For me, the problems lie not in content per se - you would expect some people to like one comic and not another - but one of trying to reach an audience already swamped with a much higher brand awareness for other things that will attract their purchasing power. Our main problem, I feel, is that many people simply aren't aware of the range of comics out there on the news stand, because publishers cannot afford to promote them in the same way as can, for example, Microsoft when it comes to the XBox or Nike when it comes to shoes.
It's an issue Lew Stringer remarks on, pointing out that until recent times (the 1980s, perhaps?) comics were pretty much the only provider of escapism. "Today, kids have a multitude of distractions," he notes. "TV, DVD's, games, mobile phones, the Internet, sports centres, and, very often, solvent parents who can afford to take them on trips at weekends. Flat pictures on paper must seem very primitive in comparison. The more distractions kids have had, the more sales of comics have fallen. Coincidence?"
In a wider context, of course, comics are far from dead - you only have to key in "web comics" to see how alive and energetic the medium is, and the growing success of graphic novel sales in bookshops, aimed at all ages. But what's the future for the news stand comic?
So, what do readers of downthetubes think? Is the British comic industry facing serious decline as far as the news stand is concerned? Are such things as digital publishing, high quality albums a way forward?
• The floor is open over on the downthetubes forum for discussion...
