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¦ News ¦ Dreddcon 2004
Update 2
The Big Debate...
James Mackay
risked permanent RSI to bring you the full lowdown on the Big Debate from this
year's Dreddcon...
Chair: Jamie Boardman
Panel: John Wagner,
JOCK, Matt Smith, Simon Spurrier, David Bishop, Jason Kingsley
Fan contributors from
the floor: Jacob Turner (teacher), Gemma Bryden (teacher), Dan Evans (13),
Ed Berridge
Subject:
Should 2000AD be a children's comic?
DAVID BISHOP: No.
The original, loyal audience of 2000AD has grown up, and the comic has grown up
alongside it. There were some experiments in the 90's in shifting back to a kid-friendly
title, or including more child-friendly strips, and these were disasters.
JOCK: It would be
nice to be drawing for children, but facts have to be faced. Returning the comic
to a child-friendly approach would halve the readership without necessarily bringing
any new readers in. To give an example, my nephew once had a picture of Judge
Dredd printed in the letters page. We were obviously very proud, and wanted to
show it off to people. Unfortunately, that was the issue which also showed Niamh's
rape! It just shows how difficult it can be to combine under-14's and the comic
as it is now.
JAMIE BOARDMAN: Well,
on the other hand, the old 2000AD - back when it was only meant to be for children,
back in the earliest progs, was still showing people's heads getting bitten off
by dinosaurs!
JOHN WAGNER: There's
no reason not to appeal to children. Aiming not to be a title that can be read
by children is a stupid thing to do.
SIMON SPURRIER: The
fact that 2000AD is an anthology is a real strength here. Readers are almost never
going to enjoy all five stories. This means that the editor could choose to run
one or two stories whose primary appeal is to younger readers every time. Bec
n Kawl, for example, seems to be popular with the younger readers.
DAVID BISHOP: That's
true. For example, Slaine is such a divisive strip that sometimes you get readers
who are fanatics about it and almost seem not to enjoy any other strips. You could
easily keep to a policy that one strip every week is child-friendly.
JAMIE BOARDMAN: I'd
like to shift the focus slightly and ask what if a child-friendly version were
launched?
DAVID BISHOP: Judge
Dredd: Lawman of the Future was very precisely an attempt to do that. Of course,
its being tied to the movie probably meant that it was doomed to fail, but it
was interesting to see the ways we did it. Dredd's a very difficult strip to make
child-friendly - nobody wants to draw a strip for seven year olds that involves
shooting someone for getting a parking ticket! What we did was issue a brief that
all strips had to be "action not violence". With the advent of fully-painted
artwork, Dredd had in the early 90's gone very "18 certificate", loads
of lushly depicted and often unnecessary ultraviolence. This was a way of doing
the exact opposite.
MATT SMITH: That's
one way of doing it. Another is the work we're doing now in the Dredd strip for
Metro. Although it's unlikely to suit the long-term fans, it's good for getting
casual readers into the Mega-City environment, and emphasises the ludicrous environment
and future crimes over the downbeat ultraviolence.
JOHN WAGNER: I have
never had a single child complain to me about gore or violence. Over the years
I've had many, many complaints from outraged parents. They'll write to me, the
publisher, their MP…the one thing they ignore is that kids love a bit of
gore.
SIMON SPURRIER: It's
like something that Roald Dahl said about his children's books. He said that the
reason that he was so successful was that he remembered what it was to be a child
and that "all children are little bastards". The one thing that children
like is clear line between good and bad characters. If someone is a bad guy, children
like him or her to get what's coming to them in the most drawn out and inventively
nasty way possible.
GEMMA BRYDEN: One
thing that strikes me looking through 2000AD is that there are very few strips
where children are the main characters. Maybe that would be a way to make it more
appealing?
JOHN WAGNER: Every
time we've tried out a child character it hasn't been particularly successful.
JAMIE BOARDMAN: Probably
the most successful child character is Luke Kirby. And he's dependent on nostalgia,
with all the window-dressing of a 1960's childhood.
DAVID BISHOP: No,
the most successful and popular child in the comic is, without a doubt, PJ Maybe.
And he's a psychotic killer!
Floor: And he's grown
up now, as well.
DAVID BISHOP: True.
Maybe having the children grow up works in 2000AD?
SIMON SPURRIER: Jason. Could Rebellion launch a stand-alone kid's comic?
JASON KINGSLEY: The
big problem that anyone trying to do that faces is that the British media have
this perception that comics are for kids and they do all their reports based on
that. For example, I was interviewed today on the BBC and the first question that
the reporter asked was whether comics are just for kids. I said that a comic is
just one more medium like books or radio. But the point is that in virtually no
other country in the world would a reporter even think of asking that question.
On the continent, in Japan, or in the US, it would be a meaningless question.
You also get a problem in that staff in retail outlets have no idea how to handle
comics. One example: a while ago, there was an issue with a very strong cover
image. I went to Borders to track it down. I looked in the racks with the sci-fi
magazines, I looked in the Arts, it looked in Miscellaneous, it wasn't there.
Finally, I looked down, and there was the children's comics rack - with 2000AD
on it. The sequence on the shelves went pretty pink Barbie magazine - Nanas and
Custard - dying judge crucified on a burning cross - Thomas the Tank Engine. I
had to go and physically move them away from that section!
JOCK: Good to see
2000AD remaining true to its subversive origins!
JASON KINGSLEY: But
the big problem is that partly because of this media emphasis, younger people
aren't even aware of the graphic form. I went to this skateboarding event recently
to hand out copies as a promotional stunt. And the question that I got asked most
often wasn't about violence, or about childishness, it was "what's a comic?"
I find that chilling.
EDWARD BERRIDGE: What
about doing some sort of halfway house between comics and computer games?
DAVID BISHOP: It's
been tried. It wasn't particularly successful, either with Wardog or Urban Strike.
JASON KINGSLEY: It
would probably be better to run a strip in one of the major computer games mags.
We'll be working on that.
SIMON SPURRIER: I
find it really frightening that so many people haven't learnt to read comics.
I mean, I've grown up with comics and I can't remember a time when I couldn't
make sense of the strip format. But you hand a prog to newcomers and they're like
"why are there all these pictures? What are all the balloons with words doing?
When are you meant to read each one?
DAVID BISHOP: And
there's a problem with using the media to promote comics to this market. And example
is when the Flintstones movie came out, they printed loads of copies to take advantage
of the gap in the market. They sold 70,000 copies in the first week. By a couple
of weeks later, the film was seen as something that had passed, and they went
right back down to 17,000 copies. Films can only promote, but they don't very
often give you a big swell in the readership.
JASON KINGSLEY: Do
people think there's a gap in the market between titles like Toxic and adult titles?
JACOB TURNER: My
experience as a teacher who talks to young teenagers about comics is that 11-14
year old will happily read superhero titles - Marvel/DC stuff - but they really
hate the violence in 2000AD. It's not so much the actual gore as the fact that
all the characters are grey areas. You can't tell who to cheer for so readily.
Quite a long discussion
followed about grey area characters, during which your reporter dropped his pen
and spent some time scrabbling around for it. The principle question was whether
children prefer to have clear role models and to be directed who to like/dislike?
DAVID BISHOP: When
Eagle comic relaunched in the early 90's - and ended up running for 10 years -
it had loads of clear-cut characters and situations. And who was the favourite
character? Doomlord.
JOHN WAGNER: Aye,
but Doomlord's quite a good guy in some ways. I mean, he wants to take over the
world, but among his own people he's a decent chap.
JASON KINGSLEY: Launching
a kid's comic would be very difficult. There are so many issues of cost - research,
distribution, publicity - to be taken into account.
SIMON SPURRIER: The
issue is about the place of comics in British society. There don't seem to be
signs of them becoming any more accepted.
JOCK: If you go into
the French equivalent of WHSmiths in Paris, you'll find that about a sixth of
the total floor space is taken up with comics and graphic novels. There's no supporting
culture here.
JASON KINGSLEY: It's
like we're stuck, culturally, between Europe on the one hand with its sophisticated
stories and art, and the US on the other with its simplicities and superheroes.
We can't quite find our own way.
DAVID BISHOP: Part
of the reason comes down to the market. When they started out as a medium, comics
were very cheap and disposable. Nowadays it is seriously pricey to produce a proper
comic. There are 2 models. You can either be like 2000AD, which started out very
high-profile, with television adverts and a huge marketing spend, or you can take
the Viz route and start out as three guys in a bedroom tossing ideas about and
using glue and scissors to put it together. Viz ended up outselling Reader's Digest.
SIMON SPURRIER: I
think of comics as falling into 2 types, though, and Viz is definitely a Beano-style
comic that just happens to have swearing. There's no equivalent of concentrating
on developing stories and using great artwork.
JAMIE BOARDMAN: Since
there is this thing about 2000AD still being available for children to buy, there
are various rules, like restrictions on swearing for example. Do the creatives
on the panel find this too restricting?
JOHN WAGNER: It can
be a pain sometimes. But in the end it's not too bad. It's understandable that
you can't have too many fucks per issue. But at the end of the day, it's not too
much trouble to just put in another word instead. My opinion on all of this is
that we've lost the kids by failing to hold onto them when we needed to. They
could be got back, but it'd be very expensive.
JASON KINGSLEY: Let's
put this into context. Zoo and Nuts are recent entries into the magazine market
of something that hadn't been tried before: the male equivalent of Heat. In the
period running up to their launches, each of them spent more than £5,000,000
on marketing. The result was a circulation in excess of 100,000 copies. But with
all that was spent on testing the product, TV advertising, paying distributors
for placements, etc, etc, neither magazine is expecting to break even for more
than 2 years after their launch. Incidentally, I learnt this from the editor of
Nuts, who is a major comics fan himself. And to do an equivalent exercise with
a new comic for children would probably have to be just as expensive to be successful.
JOCK: If the editor
of Nuts is a dribbling fanboy, would it be possible to get a regular strip in
the magazine?
General shouts
of "nooo!" and "It'd be like the Space Girls!", which descended
into abuse of David Bishop.
JASON KINGSLEY: You
never know; maybe we'll try that!
SIMON SPURRIER: Without
trying to put you on the spot, Dan, can I ask you why you enjoy the comic and
what you think we should do?
DAN EVANS: I really
enjoy 2000AD as it is. I got into it originally because my father introduced me
to it and showed me how strips work and what he enjoys about them.
MATT SMITH: See,
I think that this is one thing that's happening now. We're getting a sort of generational
pass-down that means the original 2000AD readership are beginning to have children
old enough to appreciate the comic, and a whole new readership may come out of
this.
A debate followed about
women and 2000AD, during which your reporter rested his aching hand on the basis
that it wasn't the main subject of the debate. The point was made by Gemma that
the main problem with women and comics isn't so much the content as the fact that
you have to go to dingy shops away from the city centre to get hold of them, that
these shops are full of men, and that the men frequently resent the intrusion
of women.
JAMIE BOARDMAN: Would
Tharg care to sum up?
MATT SMITH: I think
that unless a separate comic is launched, we can't really do anything other than
what we're doing now. We have strips - RoboHunter, Bec n Kawl - that are read
and enjoyed by younger readers. And on the subject of trying out new titles for
a younger audience, I'd urge everyone to look at the US. There they've got far
greater budgets to reach into to try new stuff. And yet they're caught in the
same loop as the rest of us, trying to keep their older readers while not yet
solving how to tempt in younger ones.
JAMIE BOARDMAN:
I'd like to thank the panel for their contributions.
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