No more Comic Heroes

[Banners]

Couldn't Rebellion buy the magazine?

(ie. not just one copy, that wouldn't help very much, but Comic Heroes itself)

[IndigoPrime]

Also, this £10 hangup is misleading; the mag came out quarterly in the end (though this wasn't made very apparent) and took me at least a long time to read. That's not overpriced.

The problem is the price itself, being a huge barrier to purchase. Whether the price provides value is another matter. There are plenty of mags that cost four quid but that are mostly throwaway content and adverts. It's arguable two and a half of them wouldn't take up nearly as much of your time as a single issue of Comic Heroes, but there you go. Most people pick up a mag, see £10, think "sod that", read the bits they're interested in, and then without irony spend six quid on a coffee and pastry at Starbucks.

I think lots of people assume that digital content is supported by advertising revenue and so has already been paid for in a sense (not saying this is true but it's an attitude I've encountered).

Advertising revenue is in the toilet, across print and web. Online, income per click has nosedived, to the point you need seriously popular posts to survive. This leads to more content based on linkbait rather than depth and meat. There's a good reason most tech sites squeeze Apple into every headline—it draws eyeballs, regardless of whether the story's remotely about Apple.

Worse, digital magazines now have analytics built in much of the time, which has the power to dramatically alter content. Once, it was all about "is this any good?" Now, it's all about "have enough people read this?" For example, when I was working on Tap!, we had a section in the games bit that got a dev to provide tips. One issue, we did a fantastic walkthrough of a reasonably popular game, but not enough people read it. Next time, the publisher demanded we only include games that were hugely popular, largely eradicating the interesting, and (worse) mirroring what you could already get elsewhere.

As for music, the tradition of writing a song which then becomes part of the culture and is essentially passed on for free pre-dates the record industry by thousands of years. I'm happy to pay to see a live performer but I think we've been getting ripped off in terms of record sales for ages.

I don't find that myself. I can happily buy most albums for seven or eight quid, and that seems pretty good to me. But then even small indies will find their entire album online, for free, within a day or it going live. Essentially, if you can't back up your record sales with live output (which isn't always possible, and certainly not at volume), you won't be a musician—at least, a full-time musician. And while no-one owes anyone a living, the world will be a worse place when artists and creative types all have to go 'part time'.

Couldn't Rebellion buy the magazine?

If Future was willing to sell (which it might not be—it often clings on to IP, 'just in case'), sure; but there's no telling whether it'd cost a huge amount of money, and then Rebellion would also have the staff the mag and put in place workflow to support it. There are alternative ways—Dennis Publishing, for example, now has several titles that are almost entirely freelance. MacUser has thrived under this model, a freelance editor/designer commissioning other editors and writers to fill the pages, and the publisher not being so heavily involved. But even that would be a ballache Rebellion doesn't really need.

Also add to that the likelihood of readers feeling burned as the title folds and is reborn elsewhere. Really, if Rebellion had any interest in this, it'd make more sense for it to start its own magazine, but doing that is colossally expensive if you want to get into stores; and digital-only isn't exactly a recipe for success as yet, because—as this discussion has shown—people are in the main reluctant to pay for digital-only content. (Whether a new and amazing comics mag could buck that trend remains to be seen.)

The net result, sadly, is no Comic Heroes and no equivalent.

[Fungus]

Yes, I see that casual readers would not pick up a ten quid "throwaway" magazine. I shuddered a bit at the price increase, but within a few seconds realised it was worth it.

[TordelBack]

Again, interesting stuff.  If the Prog were ever to go monthly (-shudder-), and yet retain a proportional level of content, I think I'd struggle to pay Eur15 a month for it, as opposed to the Eur3.60 a week I pay now - much the same way I find the Meg's printed price hard to swallow.

It's a difficult price-point to negotiate, just beyond a casual purchase.

[Link Prime]

Again, interesting stuff.  If the Prog were ever to go monthly (-shudder-), and yet retain a proportional level of content, I think I'd struggle to pay Eur15 a month for it, as opposed to the Eur3.60 a week I pay now

FYI- Big Bang Comics charge €2.65 for the Prog, and they'll hold 'em for you.

[Theblazeuk]

I find the Meg at £5.60 very good value for money. Beats any comic on the shelves

[Frank]

As for music, the tradition of writing a song which then becomes part of the culture and is essentially passed on for free pre-dates the record industry by thousands of years. I'm happy to pay to see a live performer but I think we've been getting ripped off in terms of record sales for ages.

I don't find that myself. I can happily buy most albums for seven or eight quid, and that seems pretty good to me. But then even small indies will find their entire album online, for free, within a day or it going live. Essentially, if you can't back up your record sales with live output (which isn't always possible, and certainly not at volume), you won't be a musician—at least, a full-time musician. And while no-one owes anyone a living, the world will be a worse place when artists and creative types all have to go 'part time'.

Yep - that's the reason so many commercially successful acts today are posh kids. Unless you're essentially making music as a hobby,  and you can afford to have your recorded output ripped off while you build up a paying live audience, you're likely to give up and get a paying job instead.

Bringing it back to print publishing, that's the same reason why so many of the big figures of literature were either aristocrats, like Byron and Mitford; civil servants, like Milton and Chaucer; clerics, like Donne and Caroll; or nice middle class girls, like Austen and Woolf, with a bit of money coming to them from their folks. The working poor - the majority of the population - are almost entirely absent from the English canon because they didn't write any of it and they couldn't afford to buy it either.

It's only once copyright law and widespread education creates a reading public which includes the unwashed masses that poor boys made good like Chaz Dickens are able to earn a living writing about the lower orders for an audience which includes the lower orders. If you want to see your interests and your concerns reflected in the popular culture, you have to pay to support the authors and artists who do so.

[TordelBack]

I find the Meg at £5.60 very good value for money. Beats any comic on the shelves

Not denying the value, it's an excellent meaty read these days.  But handing over 8 or 9 euro, which is the daily food budget for the whole family, or comics and ice creams for both the kids... well, that's a stretch.  I can usually pull together my prog money from change, but assembling the cash for a Meg is generally best done when you actually have a tenner to hand over.  And for anything over a tenner, as Comics Heroes was, well, I expect shelvability for that kind of money. 

I am working on getting 350 - it looks particularly fine. 

[Theblazeuk]

Makes sense. I guess my point was that the Meg is a collection at £5.60 whereas Comic Heroes was sadly disposable due to the mix of (outdated) topicality, despite the occasional keeper of a feature.

Digital only may be the future but it is so reliant on the spread of tablets. I only read these magazines because my Dad has an iPad, so whenever I visit/he visits I nick it for a couple of days and speed read through. I wouldn't enjoy it on my iPod and my laptop.... well my laptop is something I kind of have to sit down and use so its not so casual.

[IndigoPrime]

Subscription rates for even the most popular newsstand titles are absolutely miserable on digital, to the point some publishers have already given up. I suspect this is in part because magazines on a tablets aren't there, in your line of sight, waiting to be read. They're 'hidden'. On iOS, this is even worse since iOS 7, given that the Newsstand folder can now be placed within another folder. One advantage at least is the pricing tends to be a bit lower on digital (despite digital copies not being VAT-free), but it just doesn't seem to be a straight replacement for most publications.

[Molch-R]

Newsstand seems to be doing alright for us

[IndigoPrime]

Really glad to hear it, but I suspect comics might be an anomaly, and 2000 AD in particular may also be an outlier of sorts, due to availability issues outside of the UK. Tech mags and even beautifully created digital publications like Edge don't seem to be setting the world on fire though.

[Fungus]

That's quite pleasing if digital subscriptions aren't an irresistible tide, and paper stays with us as long as possible. I want my mags - and especially my comics - to come from a tree. For all sorts of reasons. Sustainably of course, I'm not a complete barbarian.

[IndigoPrime]

I agree—if the magazine is worth it. I still much prefer 2000 AD in print, and love the current iteration of MacUser, which is more like a designer's bible than typical computer mag. And although people might argue the toss over sustainability, I imagine you'd from a resource standpoint get an awful lot of trees for the equivalent expenditure on a single shiny tablet!

[Bat King]

I imagine you'd from a resource standpoint get an awful lot of trees for the equivalent expenditure on a single shiny tablet!

Yup.