Originally Posted by VideoNicey:
“I love the Beano and the Dandy. They were part of my childhood. They, along with the works of Charles M.Schulz and Richard Scarry, taught me to love reading, to love books, to love illustrations.
What I hate is what they've become.
The Dandy was doomed from the October 2010 revamp. Readers deserted in droves and the people involved with the comic couldn't see why. It was because the new look they'd given the Dandy was terrible. Much of it looked as if it had been hastily drawn by twelve-year-olds during a boring history lesson. The level of humour had been dumbed down to fart / burp / snot / bogeys / poo 'jokes' - fine for toddlers but not much fun for older readers. It was as if someone thought the Dandy didn't look modern or 'hip' enough any more and in making such a sweeping change threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Progress, for its own sake, is bogus. Different is not necessarily good. A lot of things that were praised as being "different" at the time have not aged well; the new-look Dandy seemed out of date the moment it rolled off the presses.
I tried to point out the obvious shortcomings, but all I got from the contributors was "the old formula wasn't working" (maybe not, but it had a lot more than eight thousand readers) and accusations that I was frightened of change. One of them even intimated knowledge that I was a "bitter failed cartoonist, crying salty tears into your own p*ss poor efforts", regardless of the fact that the Dandy was losing readers faster than the Royal Bodyguard lost viewers. In fact, the readers themselves were criticised for not "cheering on a bold move". Well, when someone makes a bold move, I'll cheer it on, believe me. I know what a bold move is, and making the Dandy look like a webcomic doesn't constitute one in my books!
They just didn't know their cause and effect. Poor comic = poor sales.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong! It wasn't the 2010 revamp which doomed it, it was the 2007 one. They changed the format so that there were a lot of non-comics pages. The people who liked the comic strips abandoned ship due to poor value for money. It was a steady decline from there. Then in 2010, the readers who liked the feature material ditched it when the comic went back to mostly comic strip. DC Thomson marketing failed badly. They put lots of copies into shops but didn't advertise it. As a result, the content of the latest revamp didn't matter. The fans who wanted to see comic strips return to the Dandy didn't come back, they lost a major opportunity to get new fans, they didn't even advertise in the Beano. They haven't lost many readers since 2010, but failed to gain any.
I first read it in the 90s in a launderette and I loved it.
Personally, I didn't buy it because I thought it would be worth something in the future, it was out of sympathy that the industry has lost yet another giant. 