Comics UK

Must have been 100 or more Beano comics at the local British Red Cross. Cost only 10p each. Looked at a couple and the dates were 2012 and 2014. Great reading for someone.

Hopefully some kid who recently started buying the comic will see those and pick them up. £10 for two years worth of issues is really good, considering at full price you'd only get four issues for that amount. The charity could have easily charged more, though maybe they're keeping it low in hopes that someone will just buy the lot.

Digifiend wrote:Hopefully some kid who recently started buying the comic will see those and pick them up. £10 for two years worth of issues is really good,

Obviously you are right about the value, Digi, but I do just wonder how many kids will be wandering around with £10 in their pocket. What's the going rate for pocket money these days?

Phoenix wrote:

Digifiend wrote:Hopefully some kid who recently started buying the comic will see those and pick them up. £10 for two years worth of issues is really good,

Obviously you are right about the value, Digi, but I do just wonder how many kids will be wandering around with £10 in their pocket. What's the going rate for pocket money these days?

A parent might buy it for the kid. I'd pay out that if my kid was a Beano reader and those were issues they were missing. I suspect I give more pocket money than most but a couple of years we calibrated it against buying a copy of one of those Cbeebies type mags which is around £3 or just over - we wanted to be sure that if she wanted to spend her own money on buying such a mag she would be able to do so, but perhaps not every week. So we give her £3 a week.

Phoenix wrote:

Digifiend wrote:Hopefully some kid who recently started buying the comic will see those and pick them up. £10 for two years worth of issues is really good,

Obviously you are right about the value, Digi, but I do just wonder how many kids will be wandering around with £10 in their pocket. What's the going rate for pocket money these days?

kids round here seem to be rolling in it these days you see em all spending money in chicken shops after school ( & shoplifting in Morrison's well i do as for so called security guards ) they got more money than me some of em and one of my mates has to give his kid £10 a day for school never mind if he gets pocket money every week. I remember i had to make do with £1 every friday and had to get a number of babysitting,leaflet delivering and news paper selling jobs to support my comic habbit when i was a kid.

£1 will buy 10. That's quite a lot for a kid. Even five will make some kid ecstatic for 50p, or even one if a mother or toddler has very little spending power. Will sell quick and bring in income. Also, if I'm tempted to buy one thing, I usually buy other items whilst I'm here. Everyone wins.

Compare that to Oxfam where the overpriced The Fly from Impact Comics or mid-run Alpha Flight is just decomposing. Will not sell for a long time (if ever) and just takes up space. Will serve no-one.

I've always seen charity shops as being both for the specific charity and serving the local community for those less fortunate. I'm glad some still see it that way.

comixminx wrote:A parent might buy it for the kid. I'd pay out that if my kid was a Beano reader and those were issues they were missing.

So would I, but Digi didn't mention parents in his post. I was merely wondering how many kids would have as much as £10 in their pocket, all of which that they could spend on the Beanos if they wanted them.

big bad bri wrote:kids round here seem to be rolling in it these days...../.....they got more money than me some of em

I think we need to clarify the age range of these children. When I replied to Digi's post I was assuming that the kid would be between 9 and 11, old enough therefore to have been trusted with money of his/her own, and with permission to spend it on things they wanted. The kids in Bri's post sound older, probably secondary school pupils.

comixminx wrote:I suspect I give more pocket money than most but a couple of years we calibrated it against buying a copy of one of those Cbeebies type mags which is around £3 or just over - we wanted to be sure that if she wanted to spend her own money on buying such a mag she would be able to do so, but perhaps not every week. So we give her £3 a week.

This approach seems eminently sensible for a young child, in particular because he/she will slowly learn the value of money. I remember that when my children were younger their approach varied. Andrew, the elder, seemed to be frittering his away renting films on VHS tapes, but Russell, who was/is three years younger, had seen a brass bell in a secondhand shop in Ormskirk, which had a ticket for £6 on it. He saved all his pocket money until he had the £6. I genuinely don't know exactly why he wanted it, but roughly thirty years later he still has it.

Phoenix wrote:

Digifiend wrote:Hopefully some kid who recently started buying the comic will see those and pick them up. £10 for two years worth of issues is really good,

Obviously you are right about the value, Digi, but I do just wonder how many kids will be wandering around with £10 in their pocket. What's the going rate for pocket money these days?

I will be honest and say that during my small one's last year in primary schools north and south of the border, it was not uncommon to see her class mates with a £10 note for tuck shop/magazines. I will admit that I did not see it all the time, but I saw it often enough to wonder if I was being overly parsimonious with the spending power that I would allow my daughter to have.

starscape wrote:Must have been 100 or more Beano comics at the local British Red Cross. Cost only 10p each. Looked at a couple and the dates were 2012 and 2014. Great reading for someone.

I've just seen this on Ebay and if a kid loved the Beano and lived near York, he could be busy for a year!

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Beano-comics- ... SwGotWh~gT

50p pocket money for me back in 1980 although I did have a paper round at the same time which hauled me £2.30 a week... boy, the comics I bought with my weekly finance not to mention bottles of lemonade and Lion's midget gems... ah, the years of innocence before I discovered girlfriends. Ha, in the end, the comics outlasted the girlfriends (not to mention the ex-wife ... unfortunately, Strongbow supplanted lemonade. On a lighter note, I still enjoy Lion's midget gems.

...Was that Strongbow the Mohawk in Comet or Strongbow the Archer in Mickey Mouse Weekly?

Lew Stringer wrote:

abacus wrote: There is a store in town called New Stories which have
70s girl comics reprints by Egmont at 99p.
Best of Beezer by Pedigree at 99p
Plus a thin war comics book in a sealed plastic bag,which traces the changes in war comics over the years and far as I can see has a few images of war comic covers like Victor etc and includes a comic strip of Charlies war.£2.99p
I keep looking at these three books but am still undecided.

The Beezer and 70s Girl books are a year old so you won't find them any cheaper than 99p.

The above was prior to christmas.
The problem for me as a collector was that do these recent reprint books count as collectables,or do I just enjoy them as an adult reader.
These two books are now reduced to 50p so I guess they were destined for me after all, therefore I duly bought them.There is always this choice for me that as to be made between the adult reader and the collector, plus available space also has to be taken into consideration.
I also find it slightly disappointing that publishers like Titan books do not have titles freely available in high street stores. I have not seen any in Forbidden planet for instance.If you don't want to use Ebay or online purchases your choices seem to be limited.

Do we blame the retailer for not stocking the comics or are the publishers to blame for not paying enough attention to marketing their products?

Missed out on The New Hotspur #1-10 from 1959 yesterday on Ebay after a couple of late bids took the winner up to £124 + postage. Picked up the free gift poster from Scorcher #3 for a fiver though to give me all three so not all bad.

abacus wrote:

Lew Stringer wrote:

abacus wrote: There is a store in town called New Stories which have
70s girl comics reprints by Egmont at 99p.
Best of Beezer by Pedigree at 99p
Plus a thin war comics book in a sealed plastic bag,which traces the changes in war comics over the years and far as I can see has a few images of war comic covers like Victor etc and includes a comic strip of Charlies war.£2.99p
I keep looking at these three books but am still undecided.

The Beezer and 70s Girl books are a year old so you won't find them any cheaper than 99p.

The above was prior to christmas.
The problem for me as a collector was that do these recent reprint books count as collectables,or do I just enjoy them as an adult reader.
These two books are now reduced to 50p so I guess they were destined for me after all, therefore I duly bought them.There is always this choice for me that as to be made between the adult reader and the collector, plus available space also has to be taken into consideration.
I also find it slightly disappointing that publishers like Titan books do not have titles freely available in high street stores. I have not seen any in Forbidden planet for instance.If you don't want to use Ebay or online purchases your choices seem to be limited.

Do we blame the retailer for not stocking the comics or are the publishers to blame for not paying enough attention to marketing their products?

Congratulations on getting those books for 50p each. Publisher and retailer definitely took a loss there. Sadly they didn't produce any similar books this year so presumably there just wasn't enough interest from collectors or kids interested in classic material to warrant continuing them.

Titan's collections are available at Waterstones and any High Street bookshop and Forbidden Planet etc. If they don't have them in stock you can order them.

Lew Stringer wrote:


Titan's collections are available at Waterstones and any High Street bookshop and Forbidden Planet etc. If they don't have them in stock you can order them.

Thanks, I checked out Waterstones at christmas and it didn't occur to me about ordering.I didn't expect them to have the Johnny Red comic for instance as they deal in books.One or two comics have been mention in the past which I was unable to find on the shelves of Forbidden Planet at the time ,although one customer I spoke to in there said there was usually a couple of weeks delay from the publishing dates to being on their shelves.

I watched an interesting repeat film recently about Ladybird books telling how each book was produced from one large sheet of paper folded with the pictures always opening on the same side.It also explained the huge amount of effort that went into promoting the book and getting it into the shops until it became a top brand .

Today there is an adult ladybird type book probably trying to create a nostalgic effect.

A lot of comic producers have great products but I think more could be done to make them easily available.
As a child there was a lot of publicity when a new comic appeared and I could get the first issue with no problem.