I posted over in our Transformers comics section about the glut of free gifts taking priority over the comics themselves with Transformers comics in the UK these days, something that seems to be prevalent with all British comics.

One of the longest running comics, The Dandy, was sucked into this obsession with free gifts but took the brave move to change its format back to it's older gift-free and comic strip centred style a while back... and has been hit hard in return. Here's an open letter from one of the writers / artists responding to some of the rather abusive online criticism that he and some of the other creative team have had to endure since the relaunch:-

http://www.fumboo.com/blog/an-open-lett ... -internet/

The modern TF comics that we see in supermarkets (as opposed to specialist stores) are utterly rubbish. That's not a stab at the talent working on them, but why would I want to read 3 pages of comic, mixed with 20 pages of random tosh, with a really bad free gift?

Maybe that's what kids like? I dunno. Gimmie a decent story anyday.

Seems to be the case with every British comic these days sadly. Publishers just won't take a risk releasing anything unless there are gifts attached because they think kids won't be interested and the stories are kept deliberately short and written as one-shot pieces as there's no guarantee that their readership will flow on from one issue to another.

I remember when I used to get The Eagle when I was a kid every week and stories used to run for 3 or 4 months with just 3 or 4 pages given over to each story, and with plenty of different stories in each issue, even if you didn't enjoy one or two of them, there were plenty that you would like and after finishing reading the comic, you'd eagerly await next week's issue to see what happens in all of the strips.

I'm actually tempted to head onto eBay and start trying to get them all again as I used to love that comic...