Messages

[Slaine]

It's time they did a Slaine one.

The series ended, and the licence expired, 12 years ago, so they're not going to doing anything.

Imagine Pat's face if he heard someone else was writing a Slaine audio!

Hmm, that Soul Sisters reprint I've always craved can't be far away! May some hot Dead Man Walking action!

[any]

although a lot of long-term reader's may have left during the Nineties (because of allegedly Bad stories) quite a few new readers joined at that time also.

I take your point, but 2000ad has lost readers regardless of what kind of stories it was printing*.

Most people don't read comics as adults, and turning up at college in a Rogue Trooper t-shirt doesn't make you a hit with the ladies. That was always the case, but in the late eighties the supply of new kid readers dried up.

Not just for 2000ad, but for any comic - the kids who started reading comics opted for licensed properties like Transformers or TMNT, a trend which continues to this day. What happened to 2000ad happened to every original UK title (and US comics too).



*1987-1994: Burton/McKenzie (100k readers, down to 50k readers)
  1994-2001: Tomlinson/Bishop/Diggle  (50k readers, down to 25k readers)
  2001-2013: Matt Smith (25k readers, down to 15k readers)

IIRC correctly - and I can't claim a perfect memory of such things, unlike some individuals - the Burton/McKenzie era ended in November 1994, by which point the final prog of the year was already at repro. [The reason I remember this is Alan McKenzie was one of 6 or 7 people made redundant on the day Jonathan Ross came to interview me on camera for Virgin Atlantic's inflight news magazine show about the forthcoming Stallone Dredd movie. Ross was questioning me and I was being all positive about the as-yet-unseen film while over Ross's shoulder I could see Alan filling his cardboard box.]

Anyway, Steve MacManus joined John Tomlinson on 2K that day [Burt had already left to run Sonic], so their time spell was basically 1995. New management swapped John and I round on December 18, 1995 so he took over the Meg and JD:LOTF while I joined Steve on 2K as Prog 978 was going to repro. [979 was the first cover I commissioned, from memory.]

I did some calculations when I arrived at 2K and realised the comic had lost an average of 7-8000 sales per year in the preceding 8 years, dropping from about 100,000 to under 50,000 per week. From 1996 to the end of 1999 we dropped an average of 3000 sales per year. It was still gutting to know that about 60 readers a week were abandoning the Galaxy's greatest comic, but that period definitely felt like the 'whoop! whoop! pull up, pull up!' bit of a James Bond film, as we wrestled with the controls, trying to stop the prog crashing.

Across that period from 87-99 there were far more factors in play than editorial choices. A distribution company change in the Burt & Alan period cost the comic thousands of sales almost overnight - totally beyond their control, nothing to do with editorial quality.

The cover price was aggressively drive up to increase/maintain profitability. Prog 520 in 1987 was only 28p. When Egmont took over at end of 1991 the price was 50p. By Prog 979 [my first cover commission] it was £1.

The comics around 2000AD aimed at much the same audience pretty much all vanished, making it much harder to maintain a dedicated shelf space for the title in shops.

Major retail chains started demanding payment for shelving titles in preferred spots in shops, which was affordable for 2K. I remember being told a favourable shelf position in a popular retail chain [it's name rhymes with Biffs] cost £3000 by the second half of the 90s. The same chain would also charge you for one of their compliance officers to go round and check shops had actually fulfilled the deal. Amazingly, they told us only 25% of shops actually racked titles according to directives from head office. Would you spend £3000 to have only a quarter of shops in one chain favourable shelf your title for one week?

The reasons readers give up on a title are many. Editorial quality is hugely significant, of course it is. But also their own financial situation, their living situation, their family situation can all have an impact.

Could the comic have been better in the Burt&McK era, or when I was editor? Yes, of course. The comic can always be better. You can get all the best creators you can afford, they can all do stellar work, you can assemble an amazing run of 12 issues with every story a gem and every page of art a classic.

And then you have to fill the comic on week 13. And all your best artists are burnt out or late or busy or have gone to work for the US [the 80s] or computer games [the 90s] or movies [the 00s] or someone else. And your writers are having an off week or a family crisis or whatever.

And you still have to fill the comic on week 13.

When any comic is great, the creators get the praise and rightly so.
When any comic is sucky, the editors get the blame and rightly so.

Hmm, I've been typing this reply so long I forgot the point I started with...

Anyway, the numbers quoted above for dropping sales by Butch are not totally accurate by my memory.
But I could be wrong. I've been wrong in the past [Sex Prog, anyone? Space Girls? I could go on...].

As someone once said, "It's a measure of how confident and successful they both are that they don't have a problem admitting mistakes and stepping up to the mark."

Funnily enough, there are certain people who never seem to admit mistakes. Maybe they never make any...

90s editorial is too broad a brush to sum up the different styles the prog exhibited during that decade. [Much as I enjoyed the Future Shock doc, it blurs those ten years into a single entity which isn't accurate, IMHO.]

There's the Burt & Mackenzie years, up to 1994
Then Tomlinson & MacManus run, 1994-1995
Then me & Steve for a spell, 1996-1997
Then me & Diggle from 97ish to Prog 2000 [and beyond].

Each of the editorial teams that took over during the 90s inherited material, to a greater or lesser extent. John & Steve didn't get to commission much of their own, but the comic's course was changing under them - Sin/Dex being a prime example, plus The Pit - a longrunner and a classic.

I was lucky enough to find Nikolai Dante in the works when I arrived, albeit 15 months from readiness and somewhat different from the version that appeared in March 97.

Andy had a huge impact as my assistant, and then...

Well, then it was 00 editorial!

Can't Tharg just take 16 weeks off? That was my plan for when Prog 2000 finally rolled round in 2016...

Yeah - I think these slow burner Wagner stories work better in the context of the case files - having said that I am sure they are a blast for new readers.

You have to get both!

I've read none of this period before and it's fascinating (knowing that Doomsday looms on the horizon) seeing the pieces slowly begin to come together. It's interesting that as early as Case Files 23 we're getting introduced to the major players!

Could be wrong, but I think I'm right in saying that readership for 2000ad and the Meg was probably at its lowest ebb during this time (the dark, post-Stallone, pre-Rebellion years, and it also ran during what is undoubtedly the Megazine's most controversial period) so there's this whole wonderful era of Dredd that many will be reading for the first time via the Case Files. Large swathes of it has rarely - if ever - been reprinted until now.

You are wrong about the readership for 2k and the Meg being at their lowest ebb during this time.

But I totally it's great that some people are rediscovering some cracking Dredds from this era now.

As we've mentioned before, the films of older Progs were really not looked after at IPC/Fleetway and large chunks of them are very damaged or plain missing. KAT-Scan does the very best with what we have access to.

The one I'd be most interested in finding out what happened to is Swimming in Blood. The first edition (from long ago, before KAT-Scan's time, was woeful—a hideous mess of moiré. The new edition, though, was very good indeed, and so whatever clean-up was done on that was seriously impressive, given the nature of the original art.

Some of the problems with Swimming in Blood stem from the repro processes used at the time. The size of the original artwork created some challenges, as did the fact that some pages had layers of collage art. Sean's originals looked amazing, but we struggled to get good scans because the depth of field was too fine to capture all the levels of the art with an even focus. Those problems were disguised by the hyper-absorbent bogroll paper the Meg was being printed on at the time, but became apparent when seen on nice glossy paper from the Mandarin edition onwards.

Sorry!

That hand/gun looks so awkward - more like he's holding a microphone.

Thanks, now I can't stop seeing Dan Dare as a dashing jazz crooner.

Mis-read your reply, am now seeing Dan Dare as a dashing jazz coroner. Quincy Jones, MD stylee.

I'm going to say the revelation that Benny Beeny gets himself transplanted into America's body, in Judge Dredd: America.

I have Sancho Panzer flashbacks everytime I pass a sign designed to tell Germans which side of the road they should be driving in Britain...

Not me, guv'nor. It was written before I got handed the Rosette of Sirius and ran as Pat intended. But I was the person responsible for not commissioning anymore Finn, suggesting Pat rest the character for a while...

Have tried to message you, uncertain if successful.

davidbishop

What about reprinting some text stories? There must be more than 30 two page Dredd text stories that can be reprinted.

Probably make as much sense to publish those as an eBook. But Rebellion flirted with non-fiction eBooks of past Megazine Interrogations and that got shelved pretty quickly, suggesting a limited market [for non-fic, at least].

No wonder Judge Death is grinning, like where Anderson's hand is - scandalous!

The solution is simple: Tharg gets to take a holiday for 16 weeks while all those year-end issues get reprinted. Once the comic catches up with itself, normal service resumes... 

Ahh, Prog 2000 - still one of my favourites!