A Few Thoughts…

I’ve been hearing a strong rumour that D. C. Thomson has stated it is no longer interested in “serious” strips only humour.  I’ve just checked my pro Face Book page and there is a posting by Nigel Dobbyn (one of the most under rated UK artists) stating that a Billy The Cat submission he had sent to Thomson has been rejected on those grounds.

How the mighty have fallen. Thomson will be all the poorer for this but as an editorial decision from them…it just does not surprise me.

Also, people are still asking “Why aren’t you mentioning such-and-such convention?”  Because no one has asked me to.  Whereas I get a press and guest invites and news of conventions in France and other parts of Europe where I’m told that I, and of course CBO, have a good reputation.

It really is almost as though there is a huge cultural abyss defined by the English channel. On one side we have huge numbers of comic albums, etc., being published covering all genres and in all styles.  And business is going great. “Yeah, but you’ll notice they do not do super heroes!” one person recently wrote to me. I can only repeat here what I wrote to him: yes they do -you have NOT been checking out CBO “daily”!

On the other side of the channel there is no industry. A few magazines with comic strips but everything else is basically amateur press -and as I have written before, nothing wrong with that except you cannot make a living in it.

In the UK comics seem almost a lost cause. But WHY?  In a previous comics industry report I noted that comic buying/reading ages in the UK are higher than France and yet France produces far, far more. I’m afraid the illiterate, TV soap watching dullard who thinks looking at photos in The Sun newspapers is high literacy have achieved superiority.

It has been left and ignored for so long that it might take more than one generation to get kids/adults into regularly buying/reading comics (but WHAT comics????). A continuous diet of pap and regurgitated sludge from the US companies seems to be what younger readers want because it is all they can mentally digest…in amongst the need for their favourite Brit writer  to include as many obscenities and rapes as they can in their books.  “Gritty realism”…sure.

So we plod on realising that those who killed the UK comics are those who worked in it and were succeeded by people who just did not have a clue how to produce a comic.

Nothing will change.

Live with it.