- They are more expensive than the previously mentioned cheap comics.
- They often have beauty tips as well as the comic strip.
- Barbie comics actually have photographs of Barbie dolls and captions rather than the typical drawn comic style.
- They have advice columns.
- The free gifts are usually to do with beauty products and often urge you to collect the entire set.
These are attractive to kids because of the fact they offer free gifts that are part of a set – the ‘nag factor’ means that parents will be urged to buy the comic repeatedly. They’re attractive to girls and they use the colours pink and yellow predominantly. Girls like them because they are different to the boy’s comics in several different ways – typical comics are stereotypically for boys.
I need to draw influences from the girls comics because my comic has to be for both genders, and the other comics are made predominantly for boys.
Another type of comic that could be considered rivals are the Spiderman, Superman and Batman type of comic – superhero. These won’t be direct rivals as they are a bit different from the plan outlined in the briefing letter, but they are still worth taking into account.
- They have a hero/villain recurring theme.
- They are more expensive and use very glossy paper.
- Free gifts are less common, but they often have ‘special offers’ on the superhero merchandise.
- They usually have posters for colouring in and other competitions.
- They usually stick to just one or two main sketches repeated in every issue.
The last type of comic that I am going to analyse is the Wallace and Gromit style ‘specialist’ comics. These comics will not be a direct threat, again, but they will have some useful different ideas that we can consider.
- These are the most expensive sort of comics and are published on high-quality glossed paper.
- Free gifts are less common.
- They are usually aimed at just the fans of the comic’s theme, rather than at a target audience like the other comics.
- They usually have more adverts for merchandise than previous styles.
- They have just one main theme that recurs throughout the comic.
There are many different qualities from different genres of comics, all of which can lend ideas to the comic that I will be designing. A combination of all these comics should help to create the ideal comic.
We can make this comic different by not only drawing from different genres of comics, but putting in new ideas.
The main thing that will be different from these comics is that we need to incorporate a health and safety theme. None of the comics analysed really use this.
The other main point that Mick Scodis puts forward is that he would like to see characters with a rebellious streak, like Dennis the Menace, which means that our main competitors will be the first group of comics.
We can make our comic different in several ways.
- Free gifts feature in all of these comic styles. We can make ours different by putting free gifts on the front that have a safety purpose, such as reflective necklaces for those children that ride bikes at night.
- Today’s audience have different threats to previous generations. We could include information about how to stay safe on the internet, disguised as internet tips that make them feel more technologically advanced than their parents.
- We can make our comic to be priced in the gap between the cheap comics and the specialist glossy comics, so that we can have quite good quality paper without going out of the ‘pocket-money’ range.
- We can publish our comic fortnightly.
- It can have two main characters that reappear in every comic, who are both enemies and friends, such as a superhero that gets annoyed with a rebellious kid, but is always there to help.
- Having a unique and different name that isn’t ‘The Something’ or ‘Something Comics’.
- Having a modern and arty style about the drawings and logos, rather than the typical comic drawing. The style of drawings in The Beano and The Dandy doesn’t really appeal to the increasingly modern, minimal sophistication of pre-teens today.
- Working in current slang words and stereotypes of people that are around today, such as ‘goth’ and ‘emo’ without offending anyone.
- Offer free ringtones and more up to date gifts.
- To tie in with the healthy eating theme, I could offer money off or buy one get one free vouchers for healthy food.
