This month what has got me thinking is the age of people involved in the UK small press scene. I remember what was written on Andy Winter’s blog after meeting my brother and me at BICS last year, “I was expecting them to be the kind of grizzled 30 or 40-somethings that UK comics fandom is full of. But not a bit of it - I'm old enough to be their dad!”

It’s hard to tell if this is really a concern or not, at the time of BICS we were still starting up IndieReview, it’d been live for around a month. Even so, we were warmly accepted and everyone was enthusiastic about the website, and getting their comics on it. Now, I’d hazard a guess that I’m one of the youngest people covering the UK comics scene, as like Andy said, everyone seems to be “grizzled” veterans. People that can actually remember reading Eagle in its earlier days as they were growing up. People that remember buying the first issue of 2000AD.

The main problem I see with this is a restrictive audience. The way it currently works is no young children (who aren’t in some way affiliated with the scene) can find it. There’s a bunch of comics that would appeal to kids, and some directed that way – but they’d never read them. The scene is in such a way that you have to literally go and search for it unless you live near a certain few comic shops that deal in indie titles. Generally they don’t go and search for alternatives, because either they don’t believe they exist or are comfortable reading the kinds of things that got them into comics in the first place, and therefore stick with the mainstream market. If taken to the extreme, what this means is that once all the veterans have left the scene for whatever reason, there will be a very, very select few left. No doubt more will come in from alternate routes, such as Tom Humberstone’s way, but this still brings in older people.

This leads me to think that obviously there is a lack of advertising and knowledge about the UK indie comics scene. Something needs to be done about it if the UK comics scene is to expand. Look at the state of the US comics scene, and looks at the UK comics scene. The difference is ridiculously vast, and why? Consider what serious comic publishers there are in England, and you come up with two or three publishers. Publishers that wouldn’t touch any title that hasn’t already been proven. Now obviously the way to change this would be to do what the comics scene does best and work together. It worked for Image Comics in the early 90’s, and at the moment there are no real competitors like Marvel or DC to fight off this side of the ocean. Of course you do have Marvel and DC selling comics here, but people are always interested in homegrown work, and getting some UK titles up on the shelves featured alongside Marvel and DC titles could only showcase how different the UK scene is, and what advantages it offers over the US output.

Obviously it’s a tonne of hard work, but it has huge advantages (and it has many drawbacks, too). It’s another topic for another time, but it’s something that is always cropping up in discussions about UK comics.

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