Moderator: AndyB
Not that I'm in the business of defending people when they can come on here and do it themselves, could you please provide us a piece of your work so that we can scrutinise it to a fine inch and slag it off regardless?wicked-stepladder wrote:Design it properly and give readers some content rather than page after page of half-arsed features that took ten minutes to make. Sorry, but this really angers me...
MikeC wrote:Presumably because their opinion of what is right differs from yours. And as they have jobs in the industry, presumably they are better informed than you. Lew is right. Magazines don't do anything because they'rewicked-stepladder wrote:Certainly, Lew. But why arn't they using both sets of characters on the cover? It's a further example of there being no "glue" to hold everything together.Fair points Digi, but those characters were on the cover and it didn't halt the downfall of sales. Today's logic is that putting Star Wars or Harry Potter on the cover is far more likely to have a recognition factor than Desperate Dan. It's hard to argue against that.
They had an established brand name and have practically decided to ditch it. Since the Dandy went "Xtreme", distribution has become noticably poorer. And no doubt overall product recognition too.
Design it properly and give readers some content rather than page after page of half-arsed features that took ten minutes to make. Sorry, but this really angers me...Thomsons have really tried to make The Dandy survive. The 2004 all-new-strip revamp made it look bright and modern, and the Xtreme revamp tried to emulate the popular magazine style of today. What else could they have done?, they do things on guidance from lots of different departments and agencies., not some
Edited because I sank to someone else's level - apologies!
To deny that magazine production is a task where many departments have input is just silly. Of course it does.
So your argument (paraphrased):
they can't receive advice because if they did they would do it differently
becomes:
the fact they receive advice and then do it the way they do means the advice must suggest that course of action
if it makes you angry enough to come on here and bang keys about it, you need a different hobby! How about some praise for a title not lying down and fading away, for trying to do something different, even if you don't like it? Sales of comics have been falling for fifty years, mostly everything has been tried, to little avail. If the people who work on comics read any of this, they would soon think comic fans weren't worth caring about in any case, ditch the comic strips we love and do something like Jetix!
Not forgetting my friendly icon this time!
Thing is, Dandy Xtreme isn't aimed at us. It's aimed at children. Our opinion of its layout or content isn't really relevant. I'm sure adults could have found fault with the comics of our childhood. We can look at any publication and think of ways of doing it differently, but that's the way they're doing it.wicked-stepladder wrote: This isn't a case of me "slagging off regardless". And if I was charging you almost three quid for you to see my work and you didn't believe it up to scratch, you would have every right to slag it off. Thank you.
I posted it half the way up the page, so I thought I'd drop it back into its proper slot again. Doh!Digifiend wrote:Why are you quoting yourself? No need to repeat yourself mate!
SID wrote:
The question I have is: Is it now selling better now as 'Xtreme' than it did before/after the 2004 revamp? If it is, then the objective has been achieved and the Dandy (albeit not really one we old folk recognise) lives to fight another day.
Even so, there's no way of knowing if it would even still be here if it hadn't been revamped. As has been said numerous times here, The Dandy's sales were plummeting anyway. That's why it's been gradually evolving over the past ten years or more. The 2004 revamp as a more modern comic didn't stop the fall so the next revamp, into a comic-mag hybrid, was a practical solution. It's not ideal but what else could be done? We live in a country now where the vast majority of kids don't read comics, so how do you save a comic from oblivion?Raven wrote:SID wrote:
The question I have is: Is it now selling better now as 'Xtreme' than it did before/after the 2004 revamp? If it is, then the objective has been achieved and the Dandy (albeit not really one we old folk recognise) lives to fight another day.
No, sales went much lower, and I think the latest figures - reported on this forum about three months ago - showed that they've now gone down about another 30%.
If Dandy Xtreme folds, I'm not sure the Dandy Annual would survive much longer either, unfortunately. Unlike Beezer, which still had a lot of long running characters when it folded (Banana Bunch, Ginger, Little Mo, Numskulls, Colonel Blink, Baby Crockett) which were able to support the annual for another decade, the only long established characters Dandy has left are Desperate Dan, Bananaman, and Cuddles and Dimples.SID wrote:(and besides, we will got the annual to fall back on).
Comparing it to the Beezer Book is irrelevant because, as you say, that was in a different decade. The fates of comics and magazines are particular to the times they exist in, due to changes in retail setups / fees, and the tastes of each generation.Digifiend wrote:If Dandy Xtreme folds, I'm not sure the Dandy Annual would survive much longer either, unfortunately. Unlike Beezer, which still had a lot of long running characters when it folded (Banana Bunch, Ginger, Little Mo, Numskulls, Colonel Blink, Baby Crockett) which were able to support the annual for another decade, the only long established characters Dandy has left are Desperate Dan, Bananaman, and Cuddles and Dimples.SID wrote:(and besides, we will got the annual to fall back on).
AndyB wrote:I thought the last figures showed that the Dandy Xtreme's decline had slowed to less than the decline of either the Beano or Beano Max.
