Comics UK

That's a drop of 68.

the revamp was in October 2010 so the Jul-Dec 2010 figure includes a considerable percentage of time post revamp.

Raven wrote:Gosh is just a very short walk from Tottenham Court Road tube.

swirlythingy wrote: Speaking as one who has walked there from Tottenham Court Road tube, I can assure you that it is not. Piccadilly Circus is slightly closer, but it's still a very bracing stroll from that.

Hmm - maybe it's because I like bracing strolls and can walk pretty fast, but I usually nip there from Tottenham Court Road when I'm passing through, even if fairly pressed for time. I've always quite liked the location of that shop.[/quote]

Gosh was a very short walk from tottenham court rd when it was opposite the british museum,oxford circus is now the nearest tube now it is in soho but i spent years walking to & from all the comic shops that were/are in central london so find the walks short.
Does anyone know if comicanna/a place in space has opened up their new premises yet as it closed down only a few months after a major refurb & said it was moving somewhere near ox circus tube on a flyer stuck on the window.I remember when the owner alex had his shop a few doors down from eternal comics in the late 80s i was in comic shop heaven then as they were both across the road from me & now they are both gone

big bad bri wrote: Gosh was a very short walk from tottenham court rd when it was opposite the british museum,oxford circus is now the nearest tube now it is in soho but i spent years walking to & from all the comic shops that were/are in central london so find the walks short.

According to the Gosh website:

The nearest underground stations to Gosh! are:
Tottenham Court Road (6 min) ...
Oxford Circus (7 min)

Now I do consider a six minute stroll to be a very short walk.


(The Gosh website does also list 30 buses that stop quite nearby.)

Gosh's old location by the British Museum was easy to get to. i agree about their new location-it's really tough to find. I've been there three times and I am still getting maps out on my iPhone to find the place. Nice new shop though.

I am pleased to hear that The Dandy has leveled out a bit, although I am worried about their new publishing schedule. An erratically published, hard to find comic with a website that desperately needs updating does not make a good business plan. I have a vested interest, but to lose the Dandy, which is genuinely an interesting comic-far funnier than The Beano in the opinion of kids I show it to, would be criminal to say the least.

Ulp and eep - I was indeed thinking of the old address, and hadn't realised they'd moved so recently; I haven't been in London since August, and haven't seen the new premises, so apologies.

Looks like the best way now, though, if you are at Tottenham Court Road tube, is to head down Oxford Street, then turn into Berwick Street.

Raven wrote:Ulp and eep - I was indeed thinking of the old address, and hadn't realised they'd moved so recently; I haven't been in London since August, and haven't seen the new premises, so apologies.

Looks like the best way now, though, if you are at Tottenham Court Road tube, is to head down Oxford Street, then turn into Berwick Street.

I haven't been to London for ages but coincidentally Berwick Street used to the the location of Dark There Were and Golden Eyed, a comic shop of the 1970s.

I was just about to say that before I saw your message, Lew. I was in Dark They Were in the 70s when Jim Steranko turned up - he was about five feet six.

swirlythingy wrote:The trouble with classroom comic stashes is that they must come from somewhere, and more often than not that somewhere is somebody else's comic collection which they grew out of (or their parents thought they had grown out of, which isn't necessarily the same thing), and didn't want to go to waste. The trouble is that, as the number of children reading comics plummets, so it follows that the number of said children growing out of them has similarly reduced, and currently the only way to increase that figure is indirectly, by the futile means of selling more copies at the newsagent.

Maybe it's time to cut out the middleman.

Meanwhile, three months in the future, Dandy issue #3582 (2012-05-19) is running a competition where the prize is a year's subscription to the Dandy, not just for the lucky reader, but for their entire school class.

It's tempting to draw conclusions...

I assume if the worst happens (the Dandy folding before the year is up) those subs would switch to the Beano. As long as the sales figures stay steady, though, it shouldn't come to that. I don't see why conclusions need to be made. The sales figures were up slightly last time.

Digifiend wrote:I don't see why conclusions need to be made.

Well, it does have a striking similarity to my suggestion of directly distributing the Dandy to the classroom!

It's a bit non-specific about how the "share it with your class" bit works, but the two main possibilities are: collecting thirty sets of personal information and handing out thirty separate subscriptions (likely to be impractical), or awarding just one subscription, which is then delivered to the school address (assuming they can persuade the winner to hand it over, and the school to accept the prize - I can't see anything in the rules mandating school involvement in entering, and you know what people can be like about comics).

If it was going to be a straightforward prize of exactly one subscription for the winner of the competition in person, they would've said as much, so this looks like something more to me.

I'm sure everybody will be keen to see where this goes...

Raven wrote:Ulp and eep - I was indeed thinking of the old address, and hadn't realised they'd moved so recently; I haven't been in London since August, and haven't seen the new premises, so apologies.

Looks like the best way now, though, if you are at Tottenham Court Road tube, is to head down Oxford Street, then turn into Berwick Street.

Raven I've walked it loads of times it's still a very short walk no need to apologies it's about 6 and half minutes from piccadilly tube.
swirlythingy probably gets lifts in cars everywhere so anything over 400metres is a long walk.

steelclaw wrote:swirlythingy probably gets lifts in cars everywhere so anything over 400metres is a long walk.

No, most of the way from West Ham to Canning Town and back again, followed by West Ham to Stratford and then around the edge of the Olympic Park to Stratford International, as I did yesterday, partially accidentally (due to not having a map and failing to notice the directional sign on the Greenway) is a long walk. As is the two-mile return trip down a country lane I used to hike every Wednesday to pick up a copy of the Beano from the nearest town, or the one-mile distance to the nearest college which I walked for three years. Of course, if anybody in this household owned a car it would've been easy...

(Ironically, now I'm at UCL, which is much further away, the walking distance on my commute is the shortest it's ever been. I still resent having to get up half an hour earlier to catch the very special direct Northern line train which runs about twice a day, though.)

I go from Surrey Quays to West Brompton every day so who knows we may have walked past each other without knowing it a few times. We should have bleepers that ring out whenever another forum member is in the vicinity. I'll be reading my Debbie Reynolds autobiography for the next few weeks so should be easy to spot. (Purchased from charity shop for a quid - hardback too with dustjacket - a bargain).

Next set of figures is out next week, isn't it? Should make for interesting reading in light of the Beano's revamp (I'm guessing they already know the figures and it's a drop).