The post formerly known as “Where’s your pheonix?”

09/01/2012 by admin.

…because instead it ought to be called Where’s my Pheonix!

 

My regular buys, though some have not so regular publication!

The Pheonix is a new, weekly British adventure comic that is distributed (apparently) in (some) shops. It launched on Saturday… not that you’d have noticed if you didn’t read the Times or British Comic websites. As it’s name sort of implies it’s a revival of a certain other comic, namely the ill-fated DFC of a few years ago. It’s been bankrolled by an “anonymous benefactor” and apparently has enough funding to guarantee it running for another two years. Though if I ever win the lottery that will be immediately doubled.

Anyway, as I said above the comic is supposed to be distributed in shops, or at least in Waitrose. Good luck finding it though! Wherever I’ve been on the internet I’ve only seen tales of dissapointment. Waitrose isn’t as common up north or in Scotland as it is around my way, so some people went on special journeys of no small distance only to be met with a blank wall!

I didn’t have such a trek to my nearest store in Ely, but had just as much luck! Aside from a proper dig in the typically messy comics section I also checked along the tills (where the special Waitrose magazine is sold). Having not found it on Saturday I carried on into Cambridge for the other bits I wanted to buy. In desperation I also checked for it in Forbidden Planet (nope!), Smith’s (nope! But they did manage to stock all four Commando issues this time around) and various other small shops (nope!).

Picture related

However, I decided that as the comic was also available by subscription from the internet, perhaps the January 7th date was simply when those copies were posted. The actual physical copies wouldn’t be distributed to shops until the following Monday? Well I went in earlier today and… nope!

This time I tried asking at customer services too. The first person had never heard of it. Neither had the second. She rang up one of the “higher ups” who had also never heard of it. She then rang up one of the even-higher-ups who wasn’t in the office (this was about 5 o clock mind you). To be fair to them they did even offer to have him ring me back, but I just said I’d buy it online instead. Perhaps a mistake, I could have appealed to his patriotism… by calling him a traitor. And other such polite and persuasive arguments.

Picture related

Anyway, I tried my best. But now I’m going to have to be reduced to buying it online. You’d think the people that run physical shops would be more worried about people buying everything over a wire wouldn’t you? One computerised logistics centre does the work of 100 supermarkets, the shop managers are under just as much of a threat as the checkout girls if they continue to lose sales.

 

 Still you get a free binder. More shelf space I have to find!

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Posted in Pheonix, British comics industry, 2010's | 1 Comment »

Petunia Rascal

10/12/2011 by admin.

Free badge!

This is one of my favourite titles in the small press today. Probably because it’s the one that’s closest to ‘proper’ British comics, especially the modern-day Dandy! Petunia is the boss of her “crew”, the Skate Pirates which also includes Bill Pukes (the dumb one) and Jolly Rodney (the straight man). Other characters include a witch that lives under the sea and a giant eel!

 

Among other talking sea life

The first story in this book involves Petunia running afoul of the witch while skating at the market. She tries to escape by skating into the sea… like ya do. The second story is even better, as Petunia and her pirates decide to get revenge on snack companies that have put 10p crisps up to 45p!

Remember the ones with wheels?

In addition to this there has been a tiny free comic called “Do the Conger Bomba” (online here) and right now you can read an advent calendar comic that’s being updated every day until Christmas eve. Oh and it’s in colour!

http://petuniarascal.smackjeeves.com/comics/1366212/christmas-is-coming-title-page/

 

I do beleive this page contains cameo appearances

While I’m on the subject of the small press, I’m intending to create two small, irregular comic magazines. Hopefully with the first issues of both ready to go over Christmas. The first is to be called The Sentinel, and I’ll have more on that in a later post. The second, though, will be called The Small Press Digest and will feature ‘reviews’ (more like descriptions, so people can choose what they will like themselves), how-to articles and short stories/comic strips. Contributions are welcomed!

But for now…

 

 

Posted in S. Atholl Gordon, small press, 2010's | 1 Comment »

Proper British adventure comics are still around, if you know where to look - Part 4

06/11/2011 by admin.

You may recall I started this series of articles in the middle of last year, anticipating the release of what it was leading up to. However my anticipation was, in fact, 11 months out! But on the second of this month it finally arrived…

Strip Magazine

Meet the newest comrade in the battle against boring comics, and one that has shot straight into my “regular buys” pile:

 

(For some reason Cambridge Smith’s is only selling 3 Commando’s a time now)

Strip Magazine is an all-new monthly of 68 pages that costs a mere £2.99, which is amazing value considering what you get. It even “feels” longer than the Judge Dredd Megazine did in the good old days of 2004 when it was 100 pages long and cost £4.99! It’s also filled with newly-created characters that exist solely for the purpose of being comics - they aren’t just dumb toy adverts or TV show tie-ins.

We start off with a comedy superhero strip (no don’t run, it’s only a page and actually funny!), which is promisingly advertised as “The only superheroes you’ll see in Strip Magazine”. The introduction doesn’t beat about the bush either. The publisher, Bosnian Ivo Milicevic, grew up reading classic British adventure comics such as Action and Valiant. He later discovered, to his horror, that there was no equivalent comic being published in Britain today. It’s nice to know that foreigners care about this vast, vanished part of our culture - even if British people don’t!

 

Some of those parody heroes are a bit close to the bone! Lets hope Marvel/DC are able to laugh at themselves…

The first strip kicks off in fine style with a massive-explosion-to-page ratio of four in six…

 

KATHOOOM!

It’s Black Ops Extreme, and features a team of mercenaries who have all been convicted of various crimes, and are now earning their freedom by tackling the dirtiest jobs in the world’s hotspots. In this first story blowing up a drug factory in the disputed Western Sahara region. It is, in fact, unintentionally similar to Commando’s “Convict Commandos” series. The characterisation in those stories is brilliant, but here it doesn’t really have a chance to get off the ground in only six pages. But we’ll see how things go on (oh if only this was a weekly!).

I’ll remain pessimistically optimistic that this story isn’t going to end up with them discovering that actually “western capitalism” is “the real enemy” and fighting against Britain / America. But we’ll see… elsewhere in the issue it is implied that they will at some point be off to Afghanistan, a current conflict that Commando has only slightly touched on so far.

 

The comic also contains adverts for other Print Media publications, including this upcoming collection of a Croation comic called Herlock Sholmes. It sounds amusing, but there’s been some more unintentional sameness… for that was the name given to a comedy detective in Tom Merry’s Own annual from 1950!

 

Which coincidentally had the same title as the first Sexton Blake story from 1893!

But I suppose the name is pretty obvious. As is “Sherlock Homeless”, who has been spotted in Viz but also as a comic created by Mashiro Moritaka in Bakuman when he was a child!

Next we have an article on Action, the infamous comic from 1976 that featured endless violence and gallons of blood. It was dubbed “The Sevenpenny Nightmare” by The Sun, Condemned by the Football Association for encouraging hooligans and even debated in parliament!

 

Using, I notice, a picture from the newly-recoloured Hook Jaw and not the original…

For all it’s horror Action did pave the way for the long-running 2000AD. Horrific violence apparently isn’t so bad when it’s happening 130 years in the future, or to robots and aliens. The article does make the highly-dubious claim that Blackjack in Action was “the first British strip to feature a black lead character”. Even ignoring offensive stereotypes like Policeman Pete (”he takes care of the nigs”!) from Tiger Tim’s Weekly, I’m sure that can’t be right. Could this be a brief flash of Megazine Syndrome - IE completely writing off anything that came before Comrade Mills as worthless?

Promisingly this article is named “Classic British Comics” - could it be one of a series? If it is I expect we will be seeing features on non-Eagle, pre-Mills titles that are not also awash with “hurr hurr Danny’s Tranny they wouldn’t get away with that today!” ‘hilarity’.

Anyway the reason Action has been featured in this first issue is to introduce the newly-recoloured reprint of an infamous seventies classic - Hook Jaw!

 

Crunch!

Written off on a certain forum I go to as “dated” (erm, yeah?), it’s actually one of the best strips in the comic! The new colouring is pretty sympathetic to the old artwork, but It seems to me that the gore has actually been toned down(!). I’m sure pictures I’ve seen of the colour Hook Jaw pages from the original printing in Action had far more blood. But of course only some of the pages were originally coloured, here they all are.

 

The next strip is a prequel to The Iron Moon, which I shamefully don’t own yet! It’s done in the same delicate watercolour/pencil style, which looks wonderful. The main character is Charlotte Corday, a secret agent in some kind of mystic investigation department. She also showed up in London Calling, which I talked about here. The Iron Moon is actually set in a different universe to that story, but one that is no less bonkers! It’s set in the 1890’s, but Queen Victoria is both still alive, and apparently came to the throne in the 1690’s! Also the British Empire extends all the way to mars, plus France has been conquered too.

The next story is Recovery Inc. What can I say about this one? Well it features a woman in a tight black leather suit narrating the story as she creeps around stealing stuff. It’s like they threw a bunch of recentish thriller DVD’s at the writer and said “make this”. It also features swear words “disguised” by random symbols. Except those random symbols are actually text speak for the actual letters of the word. This is possibly even worse than fake “futuristic” swear words like “Frell” and they’d better pray nobody at the Mail/Express has their reading glasses on. It smacks of being written into a corner, if Eastenders (or Action!) can manage without swearing so can you!

 

Incedentally if it wasn’t for the explanation of what Recovery Inc is on the contents page I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea what this was even about.

 

Next there’s an article about PJ Holden, the artist on Black Ops Extreme, which also goes over his work for Rebellion, Warhammer and some other small(ish) press stuff.

 

The next strip is Warpaint, which smacks of the mystik faery spyrit type of stories that made me finally give up on 2000AD. It also features one of these narrating the intro, complaining about how “us people” “like stories that start at the beginning”. Actually from what I’ve seen of a lot of modern British/US comics they very rarely start at the beginning these days. Luckily the Japanese (and Commando and Spaceship Away) are there to put things right!

Anyway this story features a girl called Mia, the same name as the main character of Recovery Inc! Her and a friend are stealing pipes from an old building to sell for scrap, when the security guard catches them. He is then eaten by the pipes and Mia is eaten by a coyote spirit… and no doubt will emerge with superpowers and fight against the evil forces that are working to tear Gaia apart at her ley lines by brainwashing earth’s chyldryen into driving cars, eating meat and wearing clothes. Or something.

 

I’d say “Manga influenced” here… but I won’t because I’ve done more than idly flick through a few books in a shop!

Fortunately the next strip is far better! It’s the first winner of the Strip Challenge (don’t google that with safe search off). It’s self contained in six pages and so hits the ground running. Basically a secret agent in the future called Agent Syber rescues a kidnapped scientist from the baddies, and that’s it. Oh well, only six pages after all! I was actually pleasantly surprised to see a black and white strip. It shows that this comic is produced by people who love comics, not men in suits droning on that a lack of colour won’t appeal to the TV and Videogame generation.

 

I want to draw a colour strip set in Britain’s countryside now!

The final adventure strip is Age of Heroes. It has utterly beautiful artwork, and features a wandering blind storyteller who, erm, tells stories. It’s set on another planet, and so features references to several made up heroes. One of whom is called Drake, who was a blind swordsman - like Japan’s Zatoichi! Anyway, the storyteller begins to tell his tale of an adventuring monk called Wex, who walks along a bit, and then decides to rest but gets a knife thrown at him. Erm, and then we have to wait for part 2. Again, if only this was a weekly!

 

Finally on the back cover (on the cover! Told you this was a proper British comic!)  we have the other humour strip. This a comedy story about a faceless spy who looks very similar to the brilliant I.Spy of Sparky! Except this time he is up against evil intelligent apes. One of the hench-apes decides to change sides and help him (there’s no prospects for promotion in evil organisations), then they beat up the baddies. Well it is only a page!

Posted in Print Media, PJ Holden, Herlock Sholmes, Action, Hook Jaw, Strip Magazine, 1950's, 1970's, 2010's, Keith Page, Gem | 2 Comments »

What laziness has wrought

25/10/2011 by admin.

You may remember that I was required to take my self-published comics The Red, White & Blue and The Trident off-sale, because it turned out the character of Sexton Blake was copyrighted after all. Well I’d hoped to have had them both re-launched by early September… some hope! I’d like to make some waffling excuse, but the actual fact is I’ve been far too lazy. The 3-page Speedway story in issue 4 of the old RWB took me almost 2 months, the time I’d set aside to do the entire issue in. Oh and each issue (once it gets underway) is intended to have 19 comic pages in! Plus a 10-15,000 word text story, a 2-3,000 word serial instalment, an editor’s page and illustrations for all of those… and still be bimonthly!

 

WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

Oh well, the new date for the debut of issue 1 of both publications is January 2012. Even I ought to have finished them by then! From then on, hopefully, the RWB will be bi-monthly, and the Trident intermittent but ideally about 3 times a year.

BUT in addition to that, I also hope to be emigrating to Japan sometime next year. That means I’ll be (to begin with anyway. Perhaps things will change if certain circumstances go well) on a work visa which will restrict the type of things I can do for money. “Making comics to sell on the internet” won’t be one of those things, and so they won’t be on sale, just tantalisingly have their covers previewed on the website. Still at least for a while people won’t notice if the issues are not finished in time, so long as the covers are!

This took me ages, as you can see.

Anyway In some other bad news, I have been working on a manga-style comic for a competition organised by the Japanese embassy. The closing date for the competition is November 1st, and I’m fully booked this weekend. So it looks like that won’t be finished in time. However I do have tomorrow off work, lets see just how fast I can draw eh?

If I don’t finish the comic in time I’ll instead finish it more gradually and upload it here in a rudimentary form (the screen toning will be more Gordon Livingstone than Takeshi Obata). At least then somebody will read it!

If I had been sensible I could have had the manga nearly finished by now, but “sensible” is not in my line. I decided my room needed a re-arrange, so that I could put my various books in some sort of order, free up some shelf space and most importantly put the bed closer to the heater. I thought that this re-arrange would take “maybe 2-3 hours” and started at 5:50 on Saturday. I finished at 7:00 today. Still it feels good to have a collection that looks like a collection!

This picture was actually taken after the furniture moving was mostly finished. The only book re-arranging that had been done was the fitting of the dark brown shelf and putting the books on it (which before were where the bed now is).

No more than 2-3 hours work, this(!)

The arrangement of the rest of the books got, er, a little complicated…

 -   - 

Still it’s no worse than the comic section in Smith’s…

Finally, though, some order started to emerge. All the Boys’ Friend, Chums, Union Jack, Chatterbox and Captain are together!

 With a row of odds n’ ends in the middle.

Aand here we are, everything together with it’s companions. I even found room to put my volumes of Punch that I rashly bought on Ebay years ago and haven’t been able to shift since up there. Weirdly enough jokes about political scandals of 120+ years ago just aren’t funny today, especially if they are in French (which language Punch apparently expected it’s readers to know). Even the quality of the illustrations doesn’t save them!

  - 

Finished!

Oh yeah as well as moving my desk I also freed up some space on it.

What will I do with all this? well, draw comics on it hopefully.

Oh well, Just to show I haven’t been totally idle, the back page of the first issue of the new RWB is going to introduce the first “Felneyverse” characters to  make it into print. Here’s the rough artwork, which still needs processing, colouring, lettering and putting together.

 

Erm, quite a bit of processing…

Here we have Norman Saxon, the Sexton Blake replacement (but set entirely in the early 20th century). Xin Zhou, Norman’s assistant who will also feature in a series of boarding school tales. Eugene Manx, the secret agent hunting down escaped Nazi criminals, and the Tigers of Punjab, fighting for justice during Indian partition!

 

All my character’s faces look the same so I cunningly part-concealed one in a space suit

And here is Steve Gunn, a soldier in World War 3 which happens from 2020 - 2023 (this is set in a very different alternate universe, which diverged from our own history in a major way in 1985, with the discovery of zombies!). Sarah Millman, the future cop who features in the first colour strip (her arm looks bizarre, oops). Robert “Rocket” Redferne who will take to the space-lanes from issue 5 onwards. Finally there’s Mary of Middleford, who has a 4-page intro story on the website and ought to “kick off” (ha ha haaaa) in issue 7 or 8.

Oh and also I’ve created a new logo for The Trident too. The new version will be A4 sized and will feature a complete story of 15-25,000 words and a short story of 5-10,000 words and/or a serial installment. Not quite decided yet! Oh it’ll also have illustrations, unlike the A5 sized old version.

 

Posted in 2010's, Me!, Trident, RWB | 1 Comment »

Comic Football - Suspended!

03/10/2011 by admin.

Bad news from newcomer Comic Football, it has been sent for an early bath after a stellar performance.

 

It was a game of three halves… erm

Despite giving 110% out on the pitch, at the end of the day that old injury to football comics told and it looks like the kid will be out for the forseeable future. The manager does, however, hint at a return in the future for the plucky upstart. We can only hope we haven’t seen the last of this promising talent.

Well I’m not gonna tell any old person my address XD

In transfer news the first subscription issue of The Dandy got transferred to my house. Remember, it now has under 8,000 people on the terraces but if you buy online the tickets are only £1! Get them now and secure your place right behind the goal.

 

Posted in Comic Football, Dandy, 2010's, DC Thomson | 1 Comment »

Save The Dandy - A call to arms

16/09/2011 by admin.

Again.

There’s been quite a lot written about the decline in Dandy sales lately, a lot of it in the form of mouth-foaming ravings on blog comments. These basically split into the “the artwork isn’t that great” camp and the “it’s just what the modern style is like and besides sales of everything are dropping” camp. (The third camp being bewildered casual fans wondering what on earth provoked such fury, such as me). If you ask me in amongst all the molten lolva flowing from the trollcano there were some valid points. However neither side seemed willing to accept the other viewpoint at all, meeting it with circular arguments and personal attacks. (NB: I’ll spare you the links as they were all full of swearing and I want to keep this blog clean, it’s part of my self-publishing site… at the moment the only working part!)

All of this actually made me stop caring about the Dandy. But then I thought why let that get me down? I’m jingoistic and patriotic and usually champion century-old story papers nobody’s even heard of. Of course I should be standing up for our longest-running comic!

What can we do?

Comments from people who work on the Dandy, and parents of children who get it regularly, seem to suggest that actually kids do like it as it is at present. Of course there may be room for improvement and perhaps they’d like it even better if it had 1960’s style Dudley D Watkins artwork. BUT if it goes to the wall it will never have a chance to improve. Lets get the sales up first and worry about the details afterwards.

How can we get the sales up? Well DC Thomson haven’t exactly got Marvel or DC money behind them, they can’t afford mass advertising campaigns to raise awareness of their titles. These are often poorly distributed (not seen the Dandy in Tesco for a while now, for instance) or buried under a ton of stupid toy-covered tie-in rubbish. So, let’s not rely on DC Thomson buying adverts, lets use the oldest trick in the book…

 

It was ancient when this was printed!

What trick is that? The trick that they had to rely on when newspapers and magazines were full of ads for quack remedies, there was maybe 3 radio receivers in the whole world and television was a charming theory…

 

Yes, lets advertise the comic ourselves! Lets assume out of the 7,500-odd readers that 6,500 are “regulars” and the others might get it one week and not the next. It’s possible that the regulars will know the irregulars and may be able to persuade them to get it more often. And of course there are the friends at school who may not get any comics. If anybody from the Dandy is out there it’s certainly worth a go!

And for those of us “rather beyond” the target age group, we must know somebody with young children! Comic fans are the best-placed to remind new parents that combined words and pictures help develop to literacy. You could even mention that you are trying to learn a foreign language and want to buy comics in that language, then idly add “it’s how I learned English in the first place!”

 

Koko, then something about listening… erm…

And then of course there are other comic forums populated by people who may live in Britain but who primarily read American, Franco-Belgian or Japanese comics. Are you a member? Try and get people to rally around one of their home-grown icons!

Finally there’s a slightly more unorthodox tactic. Ever hear of guerrilla gardening? What about guerrilla comic placing? I may have subscribed to the Dandy now (£15 for 15 issues and free delivery!) but, well, I don’t exactly have much room…

 -  - 

Oh dear

…nor am I really that interested in modern comedy comics, preferring 100 year old adventure papers. So once I’ve read the Dandy’s I’ll be leaving them in places that kids or parents might find them. Because if they read it themselves and decide they want more, the job’s done! (Mind you, make sure that your “guerrilla comic placing” doesn’t get confused with “littering”! )

And before I go, that subscription link again!

http://www.dcthomsonshop.co.uk/Group-Dandy.aspx

Posted in Dandy, 2010's, DC Thomson | 2 Comments »

50 years of Commando coffee table book

05/09/2011 by admin.

On Monday I had the day off and decided to go to the National Army Museum in London to see the Commando exhibition. Because it wasn’t a weekend (like it is when I go to comic conventions) the Underground was actually working! The museum itself is a fair walk from the station, past the Royal Chelsea Hospital. The houses round that way are nice mind you.

 

When I rule my own country this is what the narrowest streets will look like.

Anyway after the walk I reached the museum, which has a banner outside advertising the exhibition. It did start on the first of this month though, the banner may not stay until the end! The museum itself is deceptively small on the outside, the inside is full of maze-like small rooms crammed with informative exhibits. The actual army exhibition part goes forwards in time as you climb the stairs, the first hall is about the New Model Army, for instance, whilst the one closest to the exhibition (on the top floor) is about 40’s and 50’s National Service.

 

The Commando exhibition itself is actually quite small, and confined to one room. It’s primarily original cover artwork, which is no bad thing as the work of Ken Barr, Jose Maria Jorge et al is beautiful! There’s a mixture of ages too. DC Thomson are great at keeping their original artwork, which allows for top-notch reprints. They even have the original art for the very first issue, which will be reprinted shortly. You aren’t supposed to take pictures, and a small bloke who might have been a Gurkha caught me XD. But here’s one of the ones I managed to smuggle across the lines!

 

50 years old and it looks like the paint’s barely dry!

Apart from the cover artwork there’s actually disappointingly little else, but only so much of a “serious” museum can be turned over to “mere” comics. There’s a very brief history of boys’ adventure comics mentioning The Boys’ Own Paper (with a 1916 monthly issue on display), examples of Commando’s IPC competitors, a mention of The Victor and a copy of “Battle Action Force”. This latter was an odd choice, Battle Picture Weekly (later Battle Action) is regarded as one of the greatest British comics ever, but Battle Action Force was just a stupid toy catalogue disguised as a comic (though unfortunately a sign of things to come).

There’s also one small cabinet featuring some authentic Commando equipment such as a silenced Sten Gun, a Commando knife, a few berets (and a helmet with a nasty-looking hole!). Behind it is a painting of the famous Saint Nazaire raid, which virtually immobilised Germany’s best battleships for the rest of the war.

Unfortunately there’s almost no interior artwork (I’d love to see the fine lines of Jose Maria Jorge up close!) but there is some more curious items - examples of the “transparencies” that used to be laid over the artwork. These have the comics logo, the knife and the title painted on them. They also have the cover of issue 11 “Closer Than Brothers” assembled with it’s transparencies, as it would have been back in 1961 for the printers! Of course today all of that is added to the art digitally instead.

One final important detail is that a couple of the descriptions lament the fact that comics are not taken seriously in Britain, and that the hard work of writers and artists deserves to be recognised and remembered much better than it is. Hopefully this display will be a small step in that direction!

In the museum’s shop the 50 Years a Home for Heroes book is on sale. It will be in bookshops at the end of the month. It’s about as thick as an annual but very large!

Like so

As well as a general history of Commando, it also contains articles on writers and artists (”general overview” articles rather than ones for individuals, unfortunately) with some amusing anecdotes and insights into their working methods.

 

With scattered-around bits of cover art. Here’s where keeping the originals comes in handy!

There’s also 6 reprinted stories, with 4 pages to each page at original size! Plus the covers are reproduced in colour (unlike the various other reprint books).

 

Why yes he does have a story in there!

Finally the reprinted stories have introductions with big blow-ups of the cover art and detail on the stories, such as how they were developed with the writer, editor and artist. These pages look magnificent, and the whole book is printed on thick, heavy matte paper that really shows off the art.

Must be about the original size of the paintings!

Despite it’s small size this exhibition is well worth visiting. The nearest underground station is Sloane Square. From there go left down the street in the picture above, then left again and right at the crossroads past the Royal Chelsea Hospital, then just go straight! Entry is free and there’s plenty else to look at in the building too.

Posted in 2010's, DC Thomson, Commando | 1 Comment »

The Beano “Gnashional Trust” special

02/08/2011 by admin.

In keeping with my timely updates on current comics, this one is actually going off sale tomorrow, but oh well. DC Thomson have teamed up with the National Trust to bring a Beano with several stories featuring the characters visiting famous locations around Britain.

Once again I’ve been taking photos of the glossy pages with the flash rather than scanning them -_-

I must remember it’s okay to scan modern comics it’s only crumbling 100 year old ones you have to be careful with!

 This has given the artists a chance to show off their skills with renditions of these grand stately piles…

While we’re here I may as well mention that the Beano has recently been running a two-page “Retro Beano” spread with classic reprints. After the shock demise of Classics From the Comics this was a welcome addition. Also the stories are presented with their original colour.

89-90 eh? I just missed these! Started getting it in 1991

There is also other reprints in the issue as Roger The Dodger and Minnie The Minx are reprints from the 80’s too at the moment, but those are “disguised” reprints with new colouring and occasionally updated dialogue (what is clearly a tape player becomes a “ipod” for instance!).

There’s also been a series of activity pages called “Where’s Dennis?”, reprinted from a big book from 1999. Unfortunately they have decided to “update” these too, by pasting on the face of the modern “TV Dennis” (who is seemingly not going to be with us much longer anyway, things are moving towards the old one being bought back). However the pasted-on artwork is at a higher resolution and sticks out a mile.

Also he’s near the middle of the picture where people will look first anyway.

Harrumph! Grrrumph! I bet it’s all PC these days anyway. Back in my day they’d give away free bows and arrows with the comic, you wouldn’t get that these days…

Oh.

Posted in Beano, 2010's, DC Thomson | 1 Comment »

Comic Football

30/07/2011 by admin.

I’ve had a week off work so you’d think I would have made an update eh? In fact I’ve not done much of anything all week. This is your future, kids!

Anyway, I’ve just now taken a subscription to the newest British comic! It’s called Comic Football and uses the DFC’s subscription only method, but being monthly a whole year’s subscription is only £19.50! That’s cheaper than 3 issues of Spaceship Away!

Only picture I could find!

The website, http://www.comicfootball.co.uk/ used to have a lot more on it, but appears now to just be a couple of sample gag strips, a buy page and a non-working “shop”. Anyway, from what I remember of the old and actually informative website this is more like a football-related version of the modern Dandy than Roy of the Rovers or the ill-fated Striker. I also expect most of the jokes will go right over my head!

But with that said it’s still a new British comic, and at the price you can’t really say no. There is also a 6-month subscription available and right now you can download the first issue for free! Any new comic is a brave venture and well worth supporting, so erm, step up to the spot and score a penalty and don’t send it for an early bath. Or something.

Posted in Comic Football, 2010's | 1 Comment »

Why manga is not going to “save” comics

09/07/2011 by admin.

You almost can’t have a discussion about the state of comics in Britain or the USA without somebody piping up with something along the lines of the following:

“The weekly anthology format is dead, manga, on the other hand…”

“US comics are all superheroes. It’s not like manga, which…”

“Comics have lost their way. The kids are all reading manga, so…”

And so on. If you ask me there’s a great deal of nonsense talked about how manga is some sort of magic potion that will put British comics back on their feet. After all it works in Japan doesn’t it? And just look at those shelves creaking under the weight of so many of those paperback sized volumes! Remember when the corner shop had that many comics in the seventies?

Let’s begin by looking at the format of those paperback sized books. Apparently “kids love that chunky format” and anyway “the weekly anthology comic is dead”. Well in Japan the nearest equivalent of “that chunky format” are books called Tankobon.

They’re a tiny bit smaller and have pointless dust jackets that keep springing off.

Tankobon are what the US comic fans would probably irritatingly call “trades”. IE they are collections of a number of chapters of one story. Ever notice how the end of every chapter of a manga book contains some cliffhanger or major plot revelation?

 

Read right to left, by the way!

Why would they go putting a cliffhanger in the middle of a book? Because the stories were not originally published in this way. They were originally published, one chapter at a time… in a weekly anthology.

You wouldn’t want to bind a year’s worth of these.

I had a book at one point that said “manga” “in total” sells 5 million copies “an issue”, but there is also monthly anthologies as well. On the other hand Wikipedia says that Shonen Jump, the most popular of the weekly anthologies has a circulation of 2.8 million. That’s the best-ever selling issue of The Beano (1950) plus the best-ever selling issue of Viz (1991?) and then a few hundred thousand more. Weekly anthologies are dead? It’s all a matter of perspective!

According to Bakuman, which I should think gets the technical details of the manga industry right amid the expected dramatic licence, reader surveys are everything to the editors in Japan. An unpopular series will be ruthlessly dropped whilst a big hit will run and run, even to the point of silly artificial extensions to the story. Britain dropped that sort of thing in the 1840’s! Of course only a popular series will make it to Tankobon format, and only the most popular of those will ever escape Japan. Nearly all the Japanese-originated manga on the shelves in Britain is only there because people bought it in a weekly anthology - in their millions.

But, you say, that is Japan! Kids and casual readers in Britain today aren’t after serial stories that they have to remember to buy every week. The days of title-loyalty are gone, today people want something they can buy the odd issue of - ideally something that has a complete story in it. Why can’t British comics do more of that? Why cant…

…oh, yeah. Those.

Yes, those. Remind me again how many pocket libraries are still going?

(NB: Actually two pocket story papers are also still going - but they’re aimed at old women and so I don’t own any!)

 Of course, part of the popularity of manga is it’s style… or is it? What is “manga style”? Big eyes and pointy chins?

Like this, yeah?

And this is textbook

And that’s pretty typical too

And, wait… they don’t all have big eyes.

Neither do they!

“Small eye syndrome” makes it’s way into the most popular series!

Chins aren’t always pointy…

This could be Corporal Clott!

If there was no text in this picture would you even call it manga style at all?

All of those are pictures from my own collection, which is not exactly huge by any standards. And I’ve only stuck to ones originated in Japan and not taken anything from the UK small press!

The fact is claiming there is a “manga style” is as absurd as claiming there is “British style”, “American style” or “European style”. Reading comics is as popular in places such as France and Belgium as it is in Japan, yet when was the last time you heard anybody saying Ligne claire was going to save British comics?

 

Though Ligne claire Hurricanes have saved Britain.

I would suspect many of the people claiming that “manga” is some sort of miracle cure that will put British/US comics back on their feet are working with this equation in mind:

I don’t know about the USA, But surely us Britons ought to know better than that? Does this terrible ebay auction composite image I’ve knocked together ring any bells?

It didn’t work for them!

“Ah” you say, “what about Scott Pilgrim?”. Well every rule has it’s exceptions, and the Viz ripoffs very nearly had their own exception in the shape of Oink! (ironically it lacked both the swear words and vicious social satire that made Viz so popular, but that’s because it wasn’t just a cynical copy!). Oink! only failed because of prudish 1980’s WH Smith staff putting it on the top shelf. The rest of the cynical “if it worked for them it’ll work for us!” publications, however, collapsed because they were simply poor copies cashing it in - and the readers knew it!

Another commonly heard view, primarily relating to US comics, is that they’re “all about superheroes”. Manga on the other runs over a huge range of genres - including wizard battles, basketball, romantic comedy, political tirades, war, noir, space adventures and even creating manga. And that’s just my own collection! And so, runs the argument, “doing manga” will introduce a range of new genres and bring in new readers.

what?

To say US comics are “all superheroes” is like saying British comics are “all slapstick and WW2″.

 

And current affairs, obviously.

The mainstream titles available in ordinary shops now might be, but it was not always like that - and need not be like that again! British comics of the past encompassed a vast range of genres including detectives, football, nurses, romance, schools (boarding to secondary modern), horror, spies, horse riding, sailing… Even sprinting got a look in! There are many reasons why we aren’t seeing the launch of new and varied comics - but “they’re not paperback sized and full of screentoning” is not one of them!

And even if it was, would it really help? Imagine a company that took it upon themselves to licence translations of Japanese manga, and at the same time commission hundreds of new local titles in the same format and style. If “manga is going to save comics” was really true, that company would be raking it in wouldn’t they?

Pictured: This is not what “raking it in” looks like.

The fact of the matter is that sales of all periodicals are falling. Comics, newspapers, car magazines, music magazines. All of them.

Pictured: Publications that are in trouble

In the end, manga is not some magic potion that the British comics industry is going to take and suddenly everything will be alright. The reason comic readership in this country is so low and so high in other countries is simply down to the culture. Publishing and retailing are businesses, and they are only going to take on things that will make them money.

In countries such as Japan and France comics are part of mainstream culture and are read by a huge cross-section of society. Any publisher who shut the door on the idea of starting a comic, or a shop who tried to prevent a new comic from being sold by charging ridiculous shelf rental prices, would be committing suicide. But simply copying the format and style of the comics in those countries (though there is a place for both!) is not going to help a great deal.

So what will save British comics? What will create a new generation of avid readers? What will turn people who haven’t touched a comic in 20 years to have another go and be pleasantly surprised?

One of these is a start

That’s right - you! Do you work with anybody who has young children? Ask them “when are you starting them on The Beano?”. Know anybody who is off to see the latest Green Lantern film? Remark “of course, the comic is better”. In fact, when somebody says they are off to see the latest Harry Potter you could always slip in “Who needs Harry Potter, I’ve got Billy Bunter!” - you never know XD.

The publishers won’t touch comics if they aren’t popular, the retailers won’t stock comics if they aren’t popular. So let’s make them popular. Success won’t be won by idle expectation, we need to be Alan Sugars and not scratchcard addicts!

 

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