Kev F
Thursday 2nd February 2012 10:36am [Edited]
Bristol
689 posts
Ah memories. Having become quite well established in comics publishing in the early 90s, I proposed a comedy magazine way back in 1993/4. The working title was LE (I know, dreadful title) and the model was Q and Empire mag. I spoke to Future Publishing and a few others, but ultimately we ruled it out as a viable option.
In 1996 the idea re-emerged as Comedy Review, to which I contributed a few articles. Future Publishing hoped to surf the wave of comedy being the new rock & roll, but after 6 issues it folded.
That was back in the days when print magazines were enjoying a bit of a boom. In the current market, my feeling would be that there's not the advertising to support such a title, and that the target audience is too small.
Similar culture and lifestyle magazines have tried and failed, most of them I bought at the time (I can't even find Cult TV mag or Craig Charles's short-lived Comedy magazine on Wikipedia, they were that successful!).
The one that I thought most promising, and that I started getting every week, was the TV-oriented cross between Q and Empire called Heat. It bombed and was only saved when it transformed itself into a girls' gossip mag. That seems to be an audience that will buy paper.
My closing thought would be that any advertising revenue likely to be attracted by a comedy magazine is already being attracted by Chortle. Chortle's had 10 years to get as big as it is, so that's your big competition.
