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Article 10: The Football Strip
From time to time, you may have wondered why Ninth Art spends so little time talking about British comics. After all, this is a British site, with British editors and several British contributors. The short answer is that there aren't very many British comics to write about. When I was a kid, the UK industry was dominated by weekly anthology titles and humour comics, all aimed at children. Most of then died out years ago, aside from 2000AD, THE BEANO and THE DANDY. Then there are some adult humour titles - VIZ and its many clones - and the odd publisher like Com.X, which seem to be primarily targeted at the American market. But the state of the native British comics industry is not desperately impressive. This presumably means one of two things. Perhaps there is a huge great gap in the market for domestic British comics, which is presently unserved. Alternatively, perhaps that audience just doesn't exist any more. Pete Nash believes there's a gap. In August, according to the Guardian, he's going to launch a 32-page weekly football comic, STRIKER. In 2004, he plans to launch an adventure comic in the same format. Presumably he'll be relying on newsstand distribution. I should take this opportunity to mention that the Guardian's article is not exactly a masterpiece of the fact-checker's art. STRIKER is not by any stretch of the imagination "the first weekly comic to launch in Britain in a quarter of a century". That claim must have come as a tremendous surprise to Marvel UK, whose TRANSFORMERS ran from 1984 to 1991. Or Fleetway, who ran EAGLE as a weekly from 1982 to 1991. Or, for that matter, even the abortive TOXIC, which ran for 31 issues in 1991. I could go on. But the general point is sound enough. It has been a very long time since anyone launched a weekly newsstand comic in the UK and made it work. Nash's choice of format is interesting: a 32-page, full colour weekly comic priced at £1 is pretty good value for money compared to American imports. Plus, Nash is aiming for an adult audience - his target market is aged 15 to 34. That is not a demographic who are particularly interested in newsstand comics, to put it mildly. So is Nash a pioneer who has spotted a gap in the market, or is he just insanely stupid? STRIKER has been running as a daily strip for years now in the Sun, Britain's top-selling tabloid newspaper. You can find the latest thrilling instalment here. Now, I'm middle class and so I have to read broadsheets and pretend I find the stock market interesting. Consequently, I don't read the Sun and I'm sadly unfamiliar with the content of Striker. It is not exactly a name that leaps to the forefront in conversations between British comics fans. You can read comics for years and remain happily oblivious to it. I have. The reaction to the announcement that I saw from other comics readers was along the lines of "STRIKER? But it's rubbish!" The couple of strips I've seen feature some rather decent computerised art, and some very dodgy dialogue for the black characters, who seem unfortunately challenged when it comes to the English language. But then, it's doubtful Nash cares all that much what the hardcore comics audience thinks. After all, his work appears in a newspaper with a circulation of 3.5 million, so he can probably live without the support of the relative handful of British Vertigo readers. Fortunately, I do have some non-comics reading friends who actually read the Sun voluntarily. I pray for them nightly. I asked them about STRIKER and was regaled with a summary of the last two years' plots. The Guardian's description of it as a cross between ROY OF THE ROVERS and the demented yet popular FOOTBALLERS' WIVES is not far off the mark. The strip regularly features real footballers - most of whom are delighted by the attention - and there's enough sex in there to make it tolerably clear that it's not a kiddie comic. I asked whether they'd buy a STRIKER comic, bearing in mind that they have no interest in comics whatsoever. Much to my surprise, yes, they would. Really. If the Guardian is to be believed, the Sun was paying Nash £500,000 a year to produce STRIKER. This sounds an astonishing sum of money - can any comic strip really be worth that much to a newspaper? But Nash certainly has money to spread around - he's got a £250,000 advertising campaign for STRIKER. Modest by many standards, but still a heck of a lot of money to throw at the promotion of a new self-published comic. Certainly by the standards of the industry, where "virtually nothing" seems to be the average budget. STRIKER has an interesting revenue stream not available to most comics. English football teams are sponsored. This means that accuracy and realism demands that, whenever they're playing, the characters are plastered with adverts. Specifically, the lead characters are sponsored by Virgin. One imagines Virgin is paying handsomely for the privilege, which might explain that surprisingly large contract. The Sun isn't keeping the strip once the comic launches, since that would have involved running reprint pages - Nash says he doesn't have the resources to produce a completely new strip for the Sun. And by implication, he wasn't prepared to give them first crack at his material (even though that would still leave 25 original pages for the weekly). So there's a limit to the value they place on STRIKER. On the other hand, the Sun's main rivals over at Express Publishing were very much interested - they even wanted to publish the comic themselves. And the Sunday Mirror's sports editor has quit to join Nash in his publishing venture. The tabloids take Nash's value seriously. Nash is quoted as saying that, "Readers are more sophisticated these days and have higher expectations - they don't want stale superheroes, tacky artwork and boring plots. They want the best artwork new technology can create and credible, interesting stories". For the most part, this is unobjectionable stuff, though the extent to which it describes the actual content of "Striker" is perhaps more debatable. The reference to readers being "more sophisticated" is arguably a bit of a red herring - going by his stated target age range, Nash is trying to invent what amounts to a mainstream adult adventure comic, and since there's no precedent for that, it's rather meaningless to talk in terms of changing reader tastes. But then, if there is such an existing audience, they're already reading STRIKER in the Sun - which gives him a pretty good chance. Does STRIKER sound like it's going to be particularly good? In all honesty, no. But whether it succeeds will still be interesting to watch. A comic like this arguably has much more chance of getting adults back into the habit of buying comics - at the moment they only buy VIZ, which has hardly educated them to see comics as a narrative medium. If STRIKER does actually bring that audience back to the comics format, that will open a lot of doors for other material. Nash himself is planning a sister title for 2004. If Nash can pull this off, then no matter whether STRIKER itself is good or bad, it would be a huge step forward for mainstream adult comics in the UK. Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review. Ninth Art endorses the principle of Ideological Freeware. The author permits distribution of this article by private individuals, on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice. Back. |