what went wrong with British comics?

new answers

Maybe not so much where went Brit readers, but perhaps Marvel/DC kidnapping the Brit writers to slave away on X-Men has something to do with it.

Same thing as went wrong w/American comics DV - total collapse in sales. In America enough people read them for the comics industry to maintain a bogus skeletal backslapping existence, in the UK no such luck (except for 2000 which is kept alive as a videogames R&D lab)

OK, but why the total collapse in sales? Did comics publishers callously neglect The Kids with disastrous consequences, or were there demographic and material factors causing a collapse in readership, despite the publishers' best efforts?

(caveat: I grew up in the 1980s, so rose-tinted spectacles may be applying)

One thing that I can remember is that in the early 1990s, the licensed comics (like Simon Furman's wonderful Transformers UK, Action Force/G.I. Joe, Ghostbusters, and the comic adaptation of the cartoon version of TMNT) seemed to mostly disappear from the shelves. I have no idea why; perhaps there was a reluctance to license out characters, or maybe there was a dearth of characters to choose from. Marvel UK decided to expand their own little section of the Marvel Universe, flooding an already crowded market with up to ten titles a month (most of which were poor). When the market crash happened, MUK was exposed and was cut back to a reprint line before being sold off to Panini.

The situation isn't really any better today; there's few comics besides the Beano/Dandy axis, 2000AD, and Viz (and there's a rumour going around that The Dandy is not long for this world). Oh, and Dr. Who Monthly, if that still includes comics these days…

Tom is right, the market just disappeared. It started, probably, with "girl's comics" (I'm thinking specifically of the Jinty) being co-opted into less and less relevant comics as the market disappeared. With the collapse of the more intelligent girl's comics, writers and artists that made their living from them (their page rate was higher) like Pat Mills, had to go out and seek more work from "boy's comics" and charge more, which drove the price of the comics up. Do you see what that did to the market share?

You have to remember, we're being nostalgic for a time most kids today wouldn't recognise. There were only three channels on television, and it still had closedowns. Nobody had a video, and lots of people still didn't have fridges or cars. You played games in the street with the kids who lived from nearby houses, or walked a couple of miles to the park.

I'm not saying "oh, we had it hard", but it made us closer to the 50s archetypes presented in the stories. Billy's Boots? The Leopard Of Lime Street? The Cat? Alf Tupper, The Tough Of The Track? These were all from a world where a policeman would give you a clip round the ear, not where a yardie would shoot you if you, a ten year old boy, tried to bust a deal. (For a good modern take on this, see Series #3 of the League of Gentlemen - can't remember which episode - where a Mark Gatiss character builds a car to fight crime. It's more visually based on Knight Rider, but it's underpinned by a Brit Comics mentality.) Either that, or the humour comics were stuck in a 30s mentality, where you got into a bit of a scrape through the equivalent of scrumping apples, but escaped a slippering at the end. (Similarly, for a televisual representation, see Chewin' The Fat, Series 4 I think. There's an extended sketch about the takeover of a Beano-a-like and attempts to modernise it.)

Garth Ennis tried to write for Commando, but DC Thompson wouldn't have him, as his stories were too modern. They ended up published by DC as War Story, and are better than anything that's been in Commando for years.

Marvel UK had a kind of naff association with Transformers and Doctor Who that was kind of off-putting. When I was 10-11 though, Death's Head and Dragons Claws were pretty much handed round the entire class -- but that's, what, 1989?

I remember being able to buy DC and Marvel comics from newsagents as well, but they seem to have stopped stocking them now. I think they've just been superceded by the sophistication of video games, which can tell a story in a way games couldn't when I was a blip. Plus, the slightly better paper formats of comics make them prohibitively expensive. When I was buying Action Comics or the Peter David Hulk, they were only 45p!

Awww.

Total collapse in sales down to (in descending order of importance)

i) Expansion of leisure options (especially computer games) contributing to -
ii) Vicious pricing circle leading to
iii) a mass medium repositioning itself as something for initiates; encouraged by
iv) Means of production in the hands of fans rather than businessmen (this was more of an issue in the US though)

Apparently 2000AD also switched distributors for some reason (it was in the History of 2000AD series in JD Megazine recently) and suddenly stopped being stocked in WH Smiths, and probably a lot of other newsagents too - I certainly didn't see it anywhere for years. Sales thus plummeted, and I guess that was that for many British people's many gateway into the comics.

And didn't Marvel UK try doing American comics too, and go disastrously wrong? I didn't read comics at all from 1991-2001, so missed all that...

Yes, there was an 'proper' DC Death's Head. It was horrible.

Anyone know what happened to Deadline? It just...stopped. Shame, 'cos it seemed to be on a real high, too.

I read something about how they poured all their energy into the rubbish Tank Girl film and that tanked Deadline in some way.

Well, that'd make sense...it's gotta be one of the worst comic adaptations of all-time.

In fact, thinking about it, one of the WORST films of all times..!

Oh, and "tanked Deadline"? Nice pun :)

i actually enjoyed a lot of that film

Alan, unless you mean the credits...you're sick, man, sick!