2024 Mikenote: Obviously a very obsolete article! The Dandy was not saved at all. The callous, indifferent and undeserving custodians of Britain's longest-running comic decided they could make far more money with 1980's art plastered on "last-minute gift ideas for dad" notebooks and bags for life, than from actually improving and keeping the comic going. No mention of what will happen when the next generation of dads grew up without the Dandy, and it's art is culturally meaningless outside of comics circles. But never mind, eh? They'll be retired then, why should they care?
Oh, also, which issue was the last? The one that celebrated the comic's 75th birthday! They're taking the piss out of us, aren't they?
Again.
There’s been quite a lot written about the decline in Dandy sales lately, a lot of it in the form of mouth-foaming ravings on blog comments. These basically split into the “the artwork isn’t that great” camp and the “it’s just what the modern style is like and besides sales of everything are dropping” camp. (The third camp being bewildered casual fans wondering what on earth provoked such fury, such as me). If you ask me in amongst all the molten lolva flowing from the trollcano there were some valid points. However neither side seemed willing to accept the other viewpoint at all, meeting it with circular arguments and personal attacks. (NB: I’ll spare you the links as they were all full of swearing and I want to keep this blog clean, it’s part of my self-publishing site… at the moment the only working part!)
2024 Mikenote: "Keeping it clean" meant trying to see both sides, too. Actually the "trolls" ('Kid' Robson and Lee James Turnock, commenting on the blog of Jamie "Dandykiller" Smart, whose corner was joined by Lew Stringer*) were completely right. Remember during the heights of Comicsgate, when we had "callous fucknecks" from some Yank comics pro on twitter? Jamie Smart was there 6 years earlier with the immortal phrase "wretched, scabby vultures".
All of this actually made me stop caring about the Dandy. But then I thought why let that get me down? I’m jingoistic and patriotic and usually champion century-old story papers nobody’s even heard of. Of course I should be standing up for our longest-running comic!
What can we do?
Comments from people who work on the Dandy, and parents of children who get it regularly, seem to suggest that actually kids do like it as it is at present. Of course there may be room for improvement and perhaps they’d like it even better if it had 1960’s style Dudley D Watkins artwork. BUT if it goes to the wall it will never have a chance to improve. Lets get the sales up first and worry about the details afterwards.
How can we get the sales up? Well DC Thomson haven’t exactly got Marvel or DC money behind them, they can’t afford mass advertising campaigns to raise awareness of their titles. These are often poorly distributed (not seen the Dandy in Tesco for a while now, for instance) or buried under a ton of stupid toy-covered tie-in rubbish. So, let’s not rely on DC Thomson buying adverts, lets use the oldest trick in the book...
It was ancient when this was printed!
What trick is that? The trick that they had to rely on when newspapers and magazines were full of ads for quack remedies, there was maybe 3 radio receivers in the whole world and television was a charming theory...
Yes, lets advertise the comic ourselves! Lets assume out of the 7,500-odd readers that 6,500 are “regulars” and the others might get it one week and not the next. It’s possible that the regulars will know the irregulars and may be able to persuade them to get it more often. And of course there are the friends at school who may not get any comics. If anybody from the Dandy is out there it’s certainly worth a go!
And for those of us “rather beyond” the target age group, we must know somebody with young children! Comic fans are the best-placed to remind new parents that combined words and pictures help develop to literacy. You could even mention that you are trying to learn a foreign language and want to buy comics in that language, then idly add “it’s how I learned English in the first place!”
And then of course there are other comic forums populated by people who may live in Britain but who primarily read American, Franco-Belgian or Japanese comics. Are you a member? Try and get people to rally around one of their home-grown icons! 2024 Mikenote: Yeah, like they would give a flying fuck. That kind say The Beano is "stuck in the 80's" as if it's a bad thing. And they're wrong anyway, it's stuck in the 60's!
Finally there’s a slightly more unorthodox tactic. Ever hear of guerrilla gardening? What about guerrilla comic placing? I may have subscribed to the Dandy now (£15 for 15 issues and free delivery!) but, well, I don’t exactly have much room...
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Oh dear
...nor am I really that interested in modern comedy comics, preferring 100 year old adventure papers. So once I’ve read the Dandy’s I’ll be leaving them in places that kids or parents might find them. Because if they read it themselves and decide they want more, the job’s done! (Mind you, make sure that your “guerrilla comic placing” doesn’t get confused with “littering”! )
2024 Mikenote: ...and we can't leave without mentioning the hilarious odyssey of disaster that was the "Digital Dandy", it's supposed replacement. Ah yes, digital comics, the buzzword of the age. Of course, what this boiled down to was "webcomics you pay for". I'm not paying for a fucking webcomic. The entire embarrasing episode is really worthy of a page or documentary video of it's own, and I'll have to do much digging in old forum posts etc. But here's a few lowlights:
・The interface was barely functional. It was supposed to show you the whole page, then "zoom in" and show one panel at a time. Except on most people's computers it completely failed to work. Those same people discovered it was trivially easy to find a direct link to the full-size comic page, thus completely circumventing the paywall!
・They "improved the stories" by "adding animated segments". Were these panels that became animated when the "viewer" reached them? Hah, fuck no, the viewer didn't even work! They were Youtube videos. Yes, the people launching a Triumphant new DIGITAL!! comic, and promising it would last 75 years (it didn't last 7 months), were too pigshit-fucking-ignorant to go on W3schools and work out how to locally host videos on their own server. OR even to embed Youtube videos for that matter, you just got linked to the actual page on Youtube. This video, of The Dandy's most iconic character, Desperate Dan, racked up about 250 views in the week after the much-publicised (and allegedly "triumphant") launch. As it's pretty much certain at least some people just wandering Youtube stumbled upon the video, it's entirely possible the Digital Dandy's initial subscriptions were barely into three figures. The failing paper comic had sold over 7000! Remember, digital comics are the future!
・The first ("First? didn't you just say it didn't last 7 months?" - Oh, we'll get there!) version of the Digital Dandy revived a bunch of old DC Thomson adventure and superhero characters and put them in a team-up to fight crime. This actually sounded like a cool idea (and they'd just recently started to showcase some of those old characters in another publication, called Classics from the Comics... before abruptly killing it). So why the hell couldn't they have tried that in the paper comic, before closing it down?
・After the disaster that was the first Digital Dandy, this "here's to the next 75 years!" comic was re-launched barely a few weeks in. Did the re-launch fix any of the bugs in the reader, make it harder to pirate, or locally-host the video parts? Did it fuck.
・Oh and by the way DC Thomson: I haven't forgotten Professor Chaos ;)
* - Now I'm wondering how close his final, oft-repeated "knowing of no plans" to fold the Dandy was to the announcement it was going to be folded. 3 days?