These figures are definitely much better than they could have been. The Dandy's sales haven't changed by any statistically significant amount, but that's infinitely preferable to dropping by 50%!
I'm becoming more and more convinced that the lesson we can learn from bringing together the sales figures, the tales of trying to find the Dandy for sale, and the tales of kids' reactions when they actually
do manage to get a copy, is that the Dandy, far from failing on its own merit, has been royally screwed by circumstances beyond its control.
And once the decline started, it can really only accelerate. Retailers decide they don't want to stock a comic, so its sales fall, so more retailers decide they don't want to stock it, etc. etc. It happened with the Fun-Sizes and Classics - that, not any fault with Classics itself, was what led to its cancellation. Did anyone ever see Classics for sale anywhere? I might have glimpsed one or two copies hiding in the largest branches of WHSmith on occasion, but that was it. The Fun-Sizes were even more difficult to find. Now the Dandy is most of the way along that same road.
This is the tragedy of clinging to a business model which served comics so well up until the last two decades of the 20th century. Gone forever is the comic rack in your local corner shop, replaced possibly with one or two copies of Cartoon Network's cash-in-of-the-week lurking at the back of the puzzle magazine section if you're lucky, but more frequently with nothing at all. Chain retailers have a slightly better record, but only because they have more shelf space - the likelihood of finding obscure titles such as the Dandy and 2000AD is directly correlated to how much space the shop needs to pad out, which isn't much of a vote of confidence in how eager they are to sell comics.
The moment when retailers, which comics continue to rely almost exclusively on the goodwill of in order to sell any copies at all, became actively hostile towards comics can probably be pinpointed fairly precisely around the moment when Oink! was mercilessly persecuted for daring to do something which wasn't quite bland and mainstream enough for WHSmith's tastes, and hounded into cancellation through deliberate mis-shelving or outright refusal. The temperature has only increased since then. Nowadays, in order to be considered as anything more significant than a niche interest, a comic must have a massive picture of Spongebob Squarepants or Peppa Pig on its cover, otherwise it's lumped right in with the 1950s lorry pictures and fishing rod catalogues.
The Beano's and Dandy's desperate attempts to redeem themselves in the eyes of retailers, in the face of all evidence suggesting retailers will never be interested, manifest themselves in other ways. Neither has yet arrived at a Toxic state of affairs, with every issue bagged up and shipped with cheap toys, and a fashionable cartoon character on the front of every issue, but both are heading that way. Price hikes and bagged toys are now inflicted upon customers at every opportunity, merely to satisfy the whims of the process the unfortunate customers must still go through in order to casually purchase a comic, not because of any evidence suggesting that customers relish the prospect of being asked to pay more for very little added value. The Dandy has gone even further as of this week, imitating Toxic's irregular publishing schedule, simply because if Toxic does it then it
must be the right way to appease those with the greatest power over commercial success. (The last time it followed that train of thought to its logical conclusion, it sold twice as many copies - but at what price to the goodwill of the people who were actually buying them?)
In short, the business model is broken, and beyond repair at that. The Beano and Dandy have experienced a long-term slide in sales, not because of independent changes in British culture, not because children no longer view comics as a rewarding form of entertainment, not because children who actually
do manage to read them dislike them, and certainly not because of any inferiority in content, but because of a culture shift away from comics in a much more important sector - newsagents. It doesn't matter whether or not people buy comics, all that matters is whether or not the retail sector
thinks they will - and from this purely hypothetical shift in purchasing habits, real, systematic havoc has been wreaked throughout an entire sector by those who rightfully ought to exercise the least influence upon its sales figures. Comics can't stand or fall on their own merits any more - they can conform to a new, bland, commercialised mould which WHSmith and independent newsagents will cheerfully stock, or they can struggle against the wind and try to produce the best output they can in the face of relentless adveristy. DC Thomson is one of the only companies left attempting to do the latter, and if anything the amount of success it's having is warning off others from following.
The paradox brought about by the inordinate amount of power wielded by the guardians of the high street magazine rack is that the inferior output invariably sells better, simply through brute force and a deliberate bias in its favour in the retail industry. If the Dandy's existence was once again common knowledge in households up and down the land, and every corner shop and high street chain had copies on its shelves, its sales figures would surely easily surpass anything Peppa Pig could muster, but those days will never arrive again, and it's been reduced to scrabbling among the last devoted scraps.
The new "Golden Age" of British comics, as recently predicted by a few of our wider-eyed optimists (you know who you are), is a complete myth. The last time comics were commercially viable was forty years ago. Today, we admittedly have a thriving small press sector, but that means very little when the definition of 'thriving' can amount to no more than a few hundred sales. Such things, along with graphic novels, are usually available only in that all-too-rare phenomenon known as a 'comic shop', which, if Gosh! is anything to go by, is not the most accessible of locations, and hardly a serious rival to a newsagent. (Until I started buying the Phoenix, I didn't even know central London
had any public transport black holes. They couldn't have chosen a worse location if they tried.)
There are people and companies taking tentative steps back into mainstream comics (where 'mainstream' is defined, from a retail perspective, as 'not quite as niche as small press'), and once again their experiences serve as a cautionary tale to anyone else considering questioning the judgement of the all-powerful chain newsagents. The Phoenix, as many of us can personally attest, suffered the ignominious fate of 99% of even the very few shops which theoretically
were supposed to sell the thing arbitrarily deciding that they wanted nothing to do with it, and to all intents and purposes now relies on a subscription-only business model just like that which decisively did for its predecessor. Strip magazine hasn't even got that far yet, but is highly likely to suffer the same fate come the moment when it's supposed to be sold outside of the Soho ghetto and its ilk.
This leads us to the inevitable question: just how
can the Dandy - and, at an unknown but certain point in the future, the Beano - become viable again? It's been plain for a number of decades that throwing it ever more forcefully at the unyielding stone wall presented by retailers will bring either misery to its purchasers, or misery to its sales figures, or both.
One of the constants in the stories posted in this thread, and elsewhere, by those who have both successfully purchased the comic and shown it to children (not necessarily their own), is that the kids love it.
Kev F once even went so far as to suggest it was statistically one of the most popular comics among the many schoolchildren he has personally had contact with, which must surely be a reflection on how a comic's quality need not have any correlation to its sales figures nowadays. The targets must therefore be: (1) get kids to read it, and therefore badger their parents for it, while (2) cutting retailers out of the middle. For a widely read, quality, original comic, you cannot have (2) without (1), as proved by the DFC, and nor can you have (1) without (2), as proved by the sad case of the Dandy.
I modestly propose a solution:
Have a look at
this post and
this followup. Consider the impact of a hitherto largely neglected factor in getting modern children exposed to, and subsequently purchasing, the Beano: the wet play classroom comics box.
It can be easy to forget, in a forum filled principally with adult comics fans, some with children, discussing the purchasing of comics, than not every child is lucky enough to have a comic-purchasing parent to introduce them to the joys of the artform. Traditionally, those who are not would come into comic purchasing by other means, whether that be television advertising, wandering around a newsagents with pocket money to spend, or a parent impulse-purchasing a title from the nearest bulging comic rack just to shut them up. Nowadays, all three methods are long gone and never coming back, and the reason behind the sales slide is that nothing has stepped in to fill the gap.
That just leaves the method which everybody forgets - kids coming across comics independently, without any money changing hands to discourage them, and with nothing better to do. How many people here read their first copy of the Beano sitting by a little pile of them kept within the school environment for emergencies? I know I did. Why has nobody yet thought of exploiting this sole reliable remaining source - beyond historical and parental goodwill - of turning formerly non-comic-purchasing children onto comics?
The trouble with classroom comic stashes is that they must come from somewhere, and more often than not that somewhere is somebody else's comic collection which they grew out of (or their parents thought they had grown out of, which isn't necessarily the same thing), and didn't want to go to waste. The trouble is that, as the number of children reading comics plummets, so it follows that the number of said children growing out of them has similarly reduced, and currently the only way to increase that figure is indirectly, by the futile means of selling more copies at the newsagent.
Maybe it's time to cut out the middleman.
It's been common knowledge for some time that DC Thomson test their products out on local primary schools. The Dandy almost lost Desperate Dan in the 2010 revamp, until the classroom subjects said they wanted him back. Waterboy in Super School was nearly called Moon Boy, before the pupils returned the unsurprising verdict that this was unclear and ill-matched to his actual powers. Dangerous Dan and countless other comics and characters have been through the same process.
Why not extend that influence to distributing actual back issues of the comic?
If the Dandy isn't sold under a sale-or-return policy (if not, that can't be helping its chances), now's the time to introduce one. When the returns come back, instead of pulping them or stashing them in some dusty warehouse somewhere, distribute them to schools everywhere. Charge nothing, and simply present it as a gesture of goodwill to the grateful teachers, and wait for the copies to filter down into the classrooms, and subsequently the pupils. The pupils, as we have already established, will love it, and soon they'll start wondering where they can get some brand-new issues of their own. This will still run up against the fairly impenetrable barrier of the Dandy not being available in half the towns in Britain, but the towns where kids
can buy it will notice a sales increase.
It may take years, but in the absolute best-case scenario, by going straight to the grassroots, DCT may succeed in instigating an entire culture change. It'll cost much less than TV advertising, or blitzing retailers, or publicity stunts, and it'll probably give better results, given the already certain effectiveness of comics in the classroom on influencing purchasing habits. The relationship could be taken even further by arranging to directly sell comics through the school tuck shop or similar, which must be much cheaper - as well as more reliable - than paying through the nose for two square inches of visibility at WHSmith.
I have no idea how practical this may be, and I'm certain it's never been done before, but if there was ever a time for desperate measures, this is it. Not just for the sake of the Dandy, but for the future of all comics everywhere. The Dandy's present treatment will surely eventually kill it, so it's better to try something new and radical, and not even entirely unproven, than to hope that the 1950s will last forever.
But I definitely think recognisable characters are important. A quick butcher's at the Dandy's rivals seems to suggest that branding and public awareness is more important than good stories. Of course, a mix of both is the ideal...
