LauraH wrote:For my money, a major problem seems to be a fixation on details rather than getting to the core of what creates popularity. Certain things never go out of fashion - weird characters in mundane situations, and mundane characters in weird situations... slapstick... clever wordplay... rooting for the underdog... misunderstanding... and so on. Dress them up in whatever details you like, and they can still entertain. The trouble is, people often think it's the details doing all the work.
(Actually, the best example I can think of for this comes from film rather than comics. Consider Pixar. So many other companies saw what they were doing in the 90s and said "Ah! These Pixar films do well. It must be because of that there fancy CG animation. Let us do likewise." Traditional 2D animation was immediately declared passe and a torrent of dreadful, shallow CG movies were created instead, most of which performed badly at the box office and led to whisperings that animation as an artform was dying. All because the imitators failed to realise that most of Pixar's appeal actually came from strong characterisation, absorbing stories and intelligent writing - age-old building blocks of good filmmaking, in other words.)
So, to steer this ramble back to comics, I'd like to see less Lowest Common Denominator and more Universal Appeal, please.
I didn't intend my first post to be this long. Oh well
Spot on, Laura. It's not quite as sunny or laid back as an April weekend in Shrewsbury, but good to see you here nonetheless.
Hi to you again Steve (and all the other chaps here!)
I wish there were an easy solution to this question of how to make comics cool, but I fear there isn't... for one thing, trying consciously to make something cool is a sure-fire way of making kids think it isn't!
I dunno, maybe instead of asking comic-reading kids what they want to see, publishers should be asking non-comics-reading kids why they DON'T like them and addressing their responses. Then again, I can't shake the feeling that kids shouldn't be asked about these things at all... that you could, y'know, use the focus-group budget to hire a bunch of talented creators and trust them to deliver quality products instead... (not that quality has ever been a guarantee of success, sadly).
LauraH wrote:
I dunno, maybe instead of asking comic-reading kids what they want to see, publishers should be asking non-comics-reading kids why they DON'T like them and addressing their responses.
Seems to be what the dandy has done, don'tcha think?
Interesting what Ian Wheeler (Toxic mag celebrating issue 100!) had to say on down the tubes-
What are your thoughts on Beano Max and the new Dandy Xtreme?
Hmm?. Personally I think DC Thompson has taken a good long look at TOXC, seen how successful it's been, and tried to emulate that by adapting its own titles to look and feel like our own? to limited success.
The problem is that both The Beano and Dandy have always been strong comics in their own right and benefit from a long and glorious history with a devoted fanbase.
Why try and shoehorn their titles and characters into magazines that dilute what made them successful in the first place?
I dunno. I think they're underestimating their target audience and trying to deliver an adults idea of what a kids' magazine should be.
MikeC wrote:Unusual for an editor to comment on other publications, even if they're asked.
And the website should be ashamed to mis-spell DC Thomson that way! Hardly confidence-inspiring, is it?
Happens here too unfortunately. Funny really, considering how some take the p out of their comics so often, but forget to take it out of the company name.
MikeC wrote:Unusual for an editor to comment on other publications, even if they're asked.
And the website should be ashamed to mis-spell DC Thomson that way! Hardly confidence-inspiring, is it?
Happens here too unfortunately. Funny really, considering how some take the p out of their comics so often, but forget to take it out of the company name.
To be fair though I bet everybody's made that mistake at some point. I tend to be rather more concerned about the number of times Siegel and Shuster gets confused with Siegal and Schuster (not to mention Simon and Schuster) - on both sides of the Atlantic!
philcom55 wrote:To be fair though I bet everybody's made that mistake at some point.
It's usually the same people making the same mistake though. It's just one of those things that niggles. Considering the hundreds of times we all must have seen the name spelled correctly on the back of their comics, (not to mention the number of times the mistake has been picked up on here) one would think it'd be ingrained in everyone's brain.
It never happens to Fleetwood comics or Paninine titles does it? Or Amalgamelted Press come to that. And Tightan Magazines always have their name spelled correctly.
philcom55 wrote:To be fair though I bet everybody's made that mistake at some point.
It's usually the same people making the same mistake though. It's just one of those things that niggles. Considering the hundreds of times we all must have seen the name spelled correctly on the back of their comics, (not to mention the number of times the mistake has been picked up on here) one would think it'd be ingrained in everyone's brain.
It never happens to Fleetwood comics or Paninine titles does it? Or Amalgamelted Press come to that. And Tightan Magazines always have their name spelled correctly.
Xtreme 3 is now with us and the Desperate dan reprint this time around is of particular interest as it contains a wartime in-joke perpetrated by stand-in Dandy editor John Hutton and artist Dudley Watkins on absentee Dandy boss Albert Barnes. During the war Albert Barnes was in the Royal Navy and chose to adopt the 'full set' look when it came to facial hair, the result being a particularly fine bushy beard that caused him much leg-pulling in the Thomson editorial offices on those rare occasions when he turned up in Dundee on leave. In light of this I don't really need to add that the naval hero displayed on the poster in the opening panel of this strip is Albert Barnes as he looked in 1940-1945.
LauraH wrote:
I dunno, maybe instead of asking comic-reading kids what they want to see, publishers should be asking non-comics-reading kids why they DON'T like them and addressing their responses.
Seems to be what the dandy has done, don'tcha think?
Seems very unlikely - I don't think any kid would say they want games cheats in a comic, for example, when every kid just gets these for free off the internet and has done for years. Why would they pay for them? That's one sign of the title being totally out of touch with kids.
They don't have time to fit a weekly comic into their busy schedules - yet they don't seem to have many problems fitting those doorstop sized Harry Potter books in. And interesting to note that the hugest things in kids culture over the past few years - Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, High School Musical - are actually very traditional and, indeed, decidedly old fashioned.
Also that a truly popular comic like The Simpsons is well written and unpatronising, not full of desperate lowest common denominator material.
Seems very unlikely - I don't think any kid would say they want games cheats in a comic, for example, when every kid just gets these for free off the internet and has done for years. Why would they pay for them? That's one sign of the title being totally out of touch with kids.
Toxic has them. Kraze Club has them. Gamesmaster has them. They're not free, either. In case you hadn't noticed, viewing cheats online and playing a game at the same time is a pita. Or don't you play games?
They don't have time to fit a weekly comic into their busy schedules - yet they don't seem to have many problems fitting those doorstop sized Harry Potter books in.
Once a year - and doesn't that kind of prove their point, that there's too much out there? There was a quote in an interview about readers missing issues because families don't go to the shops as often as they used to (presumably less than once a week) and they didn't like it.
[/quote]And interesting to note that the hugest things in kids culture over the past few years - Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, High School Musical - are actually very traditional and, indeed, decidedly old fashioned.
Yep - magazine shelves are groaning with old-fashioned and traditional material - not. And the things you mention aren't presented as being old-fashioned in any way. They're modern and very slick, even if their material is based on older forms.
Also that a truly popular comic like The Simpsons is well written and unpatronising, not full of desperate lowest common denominator material.
What makes you think that the Simpsons comic is 'truly' popular? It's not sales, so you must mean 'deservedly' or 'rightly' or some other value-based descriptor (and it's licensed from an adult-targeted TV show so they could hardly change the characters and story style, could they?).
Anyhow, muppet of the week has been spotted, I reckon. Can't you just believe they've done it for good reasons?
MikeC: "Toxic has them. Kraze Club has them. Gamesmaster has them. They're not free, either. In case you hadn't noticed, viewing cheats online and playing a game at the same time is a pita. Or don't you play games?"
My point should have been expressed thusly: that kids use the internet - which is free to them - to get them. For a comic to sell it needs to provide stuff it can uniquely provide and which kids aren't already getting from another, infinitely more popular medium.
"Once a year - and doesn't that kind of prove their point, that there's too much out there? There was a quote in an interview about readers missing issues because families don't go to the shops as often as they used to (presumably less than once a week) and they didn't like it."
How come The Beano is still weekly then, Mike? There's always been lots out there - and kids used to read many more books than they do nowadays. Heavy competition is nothing new. "families don't go to the shops as often as they used to" type explanations are just desperate PR-blurb.
" And the things you mention aren't presented as being old-fashioned in any way. They're modern and very slick, even if their material is based on older forms. "
Which is exactly what you do. Obviously. Clearly you don't provide things in a 1940s D. Watkins style - you present it in a slick, modern form with modern pacing. Yet if you'd told marketing people you were going to create a pirate movie or an all-singing, all-dancing feelgood musical, they'd have told you that both genres were dead in the water, and their focus groups would have chorused in agreement.
When you do an out and out Poochie a la that Simpsons episode, you can pretty much bet it won't work.
"What makes you think that the Simpsons comic is 'truly' popular? It's not sales, so you must mean 'deservedly' or 'rightly' or some other value-based descriptor"
No, I mean sales. Maybe 'relatively popular' would have been a better term. I was under the impression that The Simpsons comic steadily sells over three times more than The Dandy - around 140,000 copies? Is this incorrect?
"Anyhow, muppet of the week has been spotted, I reckon. Can't you just believe they've done it for good reasons?
Mike out."
I think they've done it out of desperation because of plummeting sales, but they've gone the wrong way with Xtreme (their changing to a more modern, Manga-type art style had been a step in the right direction but came far too late.)
We'll see who's right by seeing how the new comics does, though, won't we? Obviously I want The Dandy to continue.
Incidentally, I thought this was a forum where people could express contrary views without people reverting to name calling as on many other sites. But while you're at it and trying to prove yourself so solidly down wiv da kidz, wasn't 'muppet' last a fashionable insult for somebody say, about, 25 years ago - when The Muppet Show might still have been running? "Mike out" is a little tragic, too, incidentally.
But let's just see what happens with the new Dandy then, and how kids respond to it.
Overall, I also think LauraH is spot on:
"For my money, a major problem seems to be a fixation on details rather than getting to the core of what creates popularity. Certain things never go out of fashion - weird characters in mundane situations, and mundane characters in weird situations... slapstick... clever wordplay... rooting for the underdog... misunderstanding... and so on. Dress them up in whatever details you like, and they can still entertain. The trouble is, people often think it's the details doing all the work.
(Actually, the best example I can think of for this comes from film rather than comics. Consider Pixar. So many other companies saw what they were doing in the 90s and said "Ah! These Pixar films do well. It must be because of that there fancy CG animation. Let us do likewise." Traditional 2D animation was immediately declared passe and a torrent of dreadful, shallow CG movies were created instead, most of which performed badly at the box office and led to whisperings that animation as an artform was dying. All because the imitators failed to realise that most of Pixar's appeal actually came from strong characterisation, absorbing stories and intelligent writing - age-old building blocks of good filmmaking, in other words.)
So, to steer this ramble back to comics, I'd like to see less Lowest Common Denominator and more Universal Appeal, please. "
