SPACEWARP - New Venture from Pat Mills

[IndigoPrime]

Depends on whether you think the best person to decide what’s for kids is someone in their 70s. Mills did some brilliant work in the 1970s. He revolutionised a tired industry. But whether the same approach is relevant today is open to question.

My take isn’t that we have an issue of approach or content today, but of accessibility. There just aren’t that many traditional comics. Most stuff aimed at kids is plastic tat. If you don’t want The Beano, you’re basically fucked. (Yes, The Phoenix is often great, but its distribution is scattershot.)

[Art]

It's just not at the newstand anymore, or in comics shops. Check out kids comics at your local bookstore, that's where they're booming.

[judgeurko]

Apart from anything else, kids are reading comics. They’re just not reading the same kind of comics or in the same format as previous generations. I hope Spacewarp works out, but is it really for kids?

But didn't he claim it was for kids? When someone like Pat has been so instrumental & important in the world of British comics it must be frustrating to find that you are no longer relevant. That's what it feels like to me anyway. It happens to most important creative people, it all depends on how you deal with it either with dignity or the way Pat is doing it.

[Funt Solo]

Aye, that's true. Mini-Solo has book shelves full of comics (mostly in GN / book format) and has a web site she consumes vast quantities of comic at. An absolute avid reader of comics at a rate and scale that makes my own experience at that age (8) pale into insignificance.

Our attempt to engage with comics in a weekly anthology format (Phoenix) was subverted by their absolutely atrocious customer service. We tried our best to subscribe for a second year (despite the first year having turned me bald with hair loss stress) but their system defeated us.

[Art]

Ah that's a shame, big Jamie Smart fans in this house, though we mainly get his stuff in trade.

if Rebellion ever does anything with Oink they should totally headhunt him to be in charge of it.

[Funt Solo]

Oh, that's a good idea - I can buy the trades of Bunny vs. Monkey - she'll love that.

[Colin YNWA]

The boy loves the comic and still devours the trades. The latest reprints books 1 + 2 in a more Dog Man format. Gone down very well with a couple of folks we've bought it for as a present.

[Darren Stephens]

Oh, that's a good idea - I can buy the trades of Bunny vs. Monkey - she'll love that.

They recently published a lovely smaller sized collection.

[Will Cooling]

The thing with comics is not whether a child will read them if they're stuck in their face by an eager dad, but whether they will actually ask for themselves. I got my stepson reading some collections - some 2000AD, some Marvel - and he genuinely loved reading. Gave him a load of my old Marvel comics, and he enjoys reading them to. But it's never something that he actually asks for a present. It just doesn't occur to him.

[Funt Solo]

A Facebook locale, recently:

 Mod A Post: Spacewarp is great!
 User A: It felt amateurish..
 User B: I couldn't finish it.
 User C: That's unsupportive!
 Mod B: Users A & B are arseholes!

[Greg M.]

It's not a conversation I was involved in, but I've just seen it and it appears you have misread it. 'Mod B' does not call 'Users A & B' arseholes - he makes reference (in a reply to 'User C') to the well-known aphorism that opinions are like arseholes - everyone's got one. The suggestion is, in fact, that 'User C' accept that others will have different opinions.

[IndigoPrime]

Will: that’s primarily down to parents. If children don’t know they can ask for something, they won’t.

Funt: doesn’t surprise me. I was temp-banned from one group for breaking the rules, which in reality meant having the audacity to say that someone wasn’t being accurate in their regular slagging off of Rebellion.

[Will Cooling]

Will: that’s primarily down to parents. If children don’t know they can ask for something, they won’t.

Funt: doesn’t surprise me. I was temp-banned from one group for breaking the rules, which in reality meant having the audacity to say that someone wasn’t being accurate in their regular slagging off of Rebellion.

Yeah this really isn't true. Kids will ask for stuff all the time. Really random stuff, when you go "how do you even know about this?" before you realise they saw a YouTube advert or someone at School is talking about it. The problem is comics aren't the pop culture so there's no positive reinforcement - friends to talk about reading them, friends letting you know about the new ones, etc.

[IndigoPrime]

Mini-IP is currently subscribed to The Beano, The Phoenix and the new Lego Explorers. She bloody loves them. She has a pile of trades and graphic novels as well. This clearly comes from me. I wanted her to have that experience. But most parents either never had that or have forgotten about it and so don’t investigate. One of mini-IP’s best friends has a dad who is big into geek culture, and his daughter gets the Dandy annual. But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that she could have weekly product.

Perhaps comics on the newsstand are doomed. Maybe we are heading to a future where the only options will be sporadic tat purchases (a plastic bag of shite) or graphic novels. That would be a pity, because the anthology format provides opportunities that otherwise just wouldn’t exist for a range of properties. But I’ve no idea how to get around this. I live in a fairly affluent area, but hardly anyone in mini-G’s class gets any comics. (She mentioned one friend’s brother gets The Beano, so that’s about it.)

[Barrington Boots]

My brothers children are subscribed to the Beano and the Phoenix and I've noticed the main bit of fun for them seems to be getting some post of their own every week.
They do love reading them and drawing the characters but collecting and re-reading them again and again seems a bit of an anathema and I suspect this is because of Youtube, Netflix, Spotify and so on where actually having a physical copy of something just isn't done.

It's all driven by my brother though based on his own love of comics. I don't think they'd really care about them otherwise because as you guys say they're not a 'thing' for kids and so fly under the radar for most. I dropped round a big load of old Busters for them but they'd rather watch another kid playing Minecraft on Youtube.