Who's Who in the CBU 2008

Name: Regie Rigby

Regie is a strange, almost ethereal creature. Who can plumb the hidden mysteries of his dark and murky past - a past which contains a terrible secret. A secret that taught him that with great power comes great responsibility, that criminals are a cowardly superstitious lot and just who exactly knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

By day, he assumes the appearance of a mild mannered teacher, bringing the joy of literature and the English Language to classes of enthralled and enthusiastic students. But by night?

By night he goes home and writes lesson plans. Sorry. That's as interesting as he gets. Really.

The rumours about rooftop struggles with underworld uberfiends, the gossip about the hidden cave filled with hi-tec equipment and the suggestion that his car might be fitted with turbo lasers are all nonsense.

When he's not teaching he reads comics. Sometimes he combines the two activities. When he's not doing that he's either playing computer games or asleep.

(news)Agents of Change!

By Regie Rigby

Where do you buy your comics?

I was chatting to SBC’s Barb Lien about this the other day, and we came to the conclusion that this is an important question. Of course once upon a time, it would also have been a stupid question, but then once upon a time there was only one place where you could buy your comics. Twenty years ago there were very few comic shops, thirty years ago there were even fewer. The only place to buy comics was from the newsagent (or the newsstand on the big side of the Atlantic).

Britain in the fifties had such titles as the legendary Eagle, and the DC Thompson humour weeklies such a The Beano and The Dandy. Kids would go to the newsagent with pennies and buy comics along with their gobstoppers, or their Dad’s tobacco (hey, it was the fifties, they didn’t know any better...) There were also some American Comics, if you were lucky. They came over mostly as ballast on ships (or so I’m told - you understand that all of this was a little before my time) so I imagine their condition wasn’t too good, and they weren’t very common. This of course made them all the more precious. In those lean post war years, most British kids regarded America as the place good people went when they died. (Indeed, many of us still do...) Anything from there was worth having.

In the seventies Newsagents were the place to find Britain’s home grown treasures. The greatly loved and much lamented Action and its direct descendent 2000AD were the kings of the rack. In the eighties there were a couple of 2000AD spin offs, Roy of the Rovers continued to win football matches for Fulchester United, The BBC and ITV published comics based on children’s TV (The Beeb and Look In respectively) which continued a great tradition of TV based comics begun by TV Comic in 1951. American comics could be found without difficulty in newsagents all over the country. Towards the end of the eighties the humour comic Viz turned the language blue and took Britain by storm.

Of course, the newsagent was never the most reliable source for comics in the world. They would keep very low stocks, so if you weren’t there on the day the new issues arrived, you could easily miss one. Mind you, the supplies were also pretty erratic and it was not unknown for a shop to have, say, Amazing Spider-Man in stock for three months running, and then not have it for the following three. This was of course particularly infuriating if you were half way through a multi part story – and crossovers were a complete nightmare!

But in a way, this was part of the thrill of collecting. After all, there are at least a dozen newsagents in even a small town. If your regular shop didn’t have the issue you were looking for, you went to the one ‘round the corner. If you had to hunt down the missing issues, the sense of achievement when you finally located a book that plugged a gap in your collection was fantastic. But by the mid nineties, the comics in newsagents had nearly all vanished.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t notice it was happening. I discovered comics by picking them up in a newsagent, but I very quickly found a comics shop (the now sadly defunct Nostalgia & Comics in Sheffield) and started getting all my comics there. Closeted safely in there I had all the comics I wanted, and so had no need to look at the newsagents shelf.

If I had been looking, I would have seen the comics section get smaller and smaller. When big Science Fiction or Fantasy films were launched, you could no longer get the comics adaptation in every corner shop. New weekly and monthly titles were launched, but folded almost immediately. Some were simply not very good (a comic called Toxic springs to mind) others were a bit radical for the mass market (the superb but short-lived Revolver for instance). At the same time, imported comics like the DC and Marvel titles were getting harder and harder to find on the newsstand.

At first, this was not too much of a problem. You might remember the early nineties were a boom time for the industry. Comic shops were springing up everywhere. It was a brave new world where you didn’t just have a dozen or so titles to choose from in amongst the newspapers and “real” magazines on the newsagents rack. Oh no, you had a whole shop crammed full. Not just comics either. Posters, T-shirts, badges - more tat than you could shake a stick at, in fact. With all that, the thrill of the hunt looked a little tame. Who needed the newsagent?

Of course, it couldn’t (and didn’t) last. At the end of the nineties the comics boom went bust. Comic shops either diversified, or went out of business. Indeed, many did both. The comic shop I had been frequenting in York, named Nu Earth after the planted in the Rogue Trooper strip from 2000AD, changed it’s name to “The Sci Fi Store” and shifted the focus of it’s business from comics to Star Trek and Star Wars merchandising. It got harder and harder to get the comics I wanted from there, and in the end I gave up on them. Eventually they went under.

This is a continuing trend. The last time I went into a comic shop it seemed to have metamorphosed into a Pokemon booth. The comics market continues to implode and there seems no end in sight.

Why?

Well, the disappearance of comics from the newsstand has something to do with it. Comic shops are wonderful places, but they tend not to be the sort of shops you visit unless you’re already into comics. Many of them are actually quite intimidating for the uninitiated. Think about it for a second. Why did you go into a comic shop that first time? I’m guessing it’s because you wanted a comic. Why did you want a comic? Because you knew you liked reading them. How did you know that? In all probability because you’d been buying comics for ages already, from the newsstand.

Without the newsstand as an “entry point”, how does the next generation of comics readers get its first comic? When I was a kid you’d either pick up comics yourself when you end into the newsagent for something else, (sweets, or your parents newspaper, or whatever) or a kindly relative would buy comics for you. Since neither non-comics reading kids or their relatives are likely to be dropping into a comics shop, this way is now largely closed.

As a result, comics seem to have an aging readership. For example, when 2000AD was launched in 1977, the average age of its readers was around 12 (don‘t quote me on that, as I‘m giving the figure from memory, but it was there or thereabouts). The Mighty Tharg recently revealed in a 2000AD letter column that the average 2000AD reader is now 24.

This is not a problem in itself. All that has happened is that the kids who were reading the comic a dozen years ago are still reading it. Over that time it has grown up with it’s readership and by doing so has ceased to appeal to the younger market. That’s fine. Hey, I’m the last person to complain that adults are reading comics - it means I get fewer strange looks when I read Batman on the train.
What is most definitely not fine however is the fact that nothing has moved onto the newsagents rack to fill the space that the shift of 2000AD’s focus has left.

“Ah – but things have changed over the years” I hear you cry. “This is not the seventies anymore - kids have so much more to do these days – games consoles, surfing the net, cable TV. They just aren’t interested in comics anymore.”

Well, I beg to differ. Kids don’t read comics anymore, I’ll grant you that. But why would they? I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but in Britain, when you grow out of The Beano, you’re not quite old enough to appreciate 2000AD and there’s nothing else available in the newsagent. Naturally enough, most kids decide that there isn’t a comic for them and go on to other things.

However, I can tell you from experience that if pre teen kids are given comics they can get into, they get into them in a big way. When I’m not slacking off and reading comics, or writing for SBC, I’m a trainee English Teacher. I have seen the reaction kids have to comics like Spider-Man or Justice League of America. They say they’ve never seen anything like it. They love them, and they want to know where they can get more.

This isn’t just my experience. I have heard the same sort of thing from other, fully qualified, teachers too. There are a lot of things competing with comics for attention, but so what? If the product is good comics can compete with anything else that might be out there. (And in spite of the moans that I have about the quality of comics these days, the good stuff is available).

So, what do we do? How do we bring comics to a wider readership? How do we introduce a new generation to the wonder that is Sequential Art?

Well, the most obvious thing to do would be to deal with the distribution system. Diamond is a fair enough organisation, but it’s methods and practices don’t mesh well with the news trade which is used to the security of sale or return ordering. (and I have to say that Previews can be a pain in the neck) Other distributors such as Top Shelf, are beginning to concentrate on the Graphic Novel format and distributing through book shops.

Perhaps not a bad thing in itself, but your non comics reading customer is a lot more likely to risk a couple of quid on a comic they might not like than fifteen pounds on a graphic novel. If we could reverse the trend of the last ten years and get distributors to work within the news trade kids would get that exposure to comics they miss out on at the moment.

Sadly, this isn’t going to happen – certainly not any time soon. The short term economics of such a move would be regarded by most companies as prohibitive. So, is that it? Will there be no new readers? Is the average readership of a medium which many deride as the province of children to continue aging? In another twenty years, will your average 2000AD reader be forty four? Will we all grow old and die, with no new generation of readers to replace us? Is there no hope at all?

Well, let’s not get too carried away with all the doom and gloom. Things are bad, but I really don’t believe that they are life threatening yet. First of all, comics have something that no other medium has (except perhaps jazz music and certain genres of film). Comics fans really are a breed apart – perhaps because the medium has become so badly ghettoised, comics fandom is almost ridiculously loyal, and extremely vocal about their passion. We all want to spread the word. For example, the reason I have experience of the reaction of school children to comics is because I took the comics to the school myself, as did the other teachers who have spoken about the same sort of experience.

I hate to be banging the drum for the site in quite such an obvious way, but the other thing the medium has going for it is the internet and sites like Silver Bullet.

There is nothing intimidating about a website. Anybody can browse wherever they like without worrying that they don’t know their Marvel from their Kitchen Sink and you can stumble on it by accident!

Try this example on for size. There’s an X-Men movie coming out soon. (What do you mean you hadn’t noticed?) Loads of kids will go and see the movie, perhaps without connecting the characters to comics at all. (How many non comics readers knew that Men in Black or The Mask were comics characters? I even heard someone on the radio describe Superman as a movie character a few weeks ago.)

But then the kids go home and think, “That was cool - I wonder what other X-Men stuff I can find”. So they get online, type ‘X-Men’ into their search engines and come up with a whole buch of X related stuff. At least one of those sites has a link to us here at Silver Bullet - or someone like us (but hey, we were nominated for an Exy Award after all).

Now I grant you that some of these kids will see that we’re not full of pictures of Wolverine, click their browsers ‘Back’ button, and be out of here. But some will stick around, perhaps follow some of our links on to other comics related sites. Before they know it, they’ll be as hooked as the rest of us.

If Scott McCloud is right, their comics will be mostly online anyway before long. While I’m not sure I totally agree with him (which is a subject for another time) I am sure that the internet will be the entry point for many of the next generation of comics readers - because there will be a next generation.

What’s happening to the industry at the moment is change, not extinction. Is it change for the better? Well, who knows? Ask me again in twenty years. I’ll be the cantankerous tweed wearing “Giles from Buffy” wannabe sitting at the back of an English classroom reading 2000AD.