David Fickling is an innovative children's book editor and publisher of David Fickling Books. His recent publications include Siobhan Dowd’s A Swift Pure Cry and The London Eye Mystery and Bog child; Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time; John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas; Jenny Downham’s Before I Die; Philip Pullman’s Lyra’s Oxford and Once Upom a Time in the North.

 Nikki Gamble met David at the BFI to talk about his latest venture, the DFC.

It’s an exciting day, the launch of DFC. I know you’ve been very guarded about the content so that readers will still have something to look forward to when the first issue drops through the letterbox.

Yes, I think it would be horrible if they had seen it all before. I don’t mind little bits, sneaking out. But when they come to open the yellow and red striped envelope on 30th of May, I want them to experience a sense of theatre.

Comics were clearly an important part of your childhood reading repertoire.  I read that you had a particular allegiance to Boys’ World ,which later merged with Eagle. Can you tell us something about that?

The merger was a great irritation to me.

Why was that?

Well, you become very fond of the strips and stories that are running week by week in your favourite comic. What happened when Eagle, came along and Boys’ World was subsumed into it was that the new comic lost my favourite strips. Only a few were kept. That sense of ownership was so important. I think you are joined to the stories when you’re a young person.

That’s interesting because Boys’ World didn’t run for very long. I think there were only 89 issues made between 1963 and 1964.

Really? So you see what a big impact it made on me. That’s a very good example of different appreciation of time in childhood and adulthood, because we forget how long and stretched out childhood seemed. The days were long, full and never ending; I thought I was with Boys’ World for ages.

 I don’t know much about the history of the comic.

There’s an active huge fan-base where you can make connections with other enthusiasts with remarkable memories for the details of each episode. Of course quite a few still have their collections.

Which were your favourite strips in Boys’ World?

 I remember all sorts of strips The Steel Claw and The Human Guinea Pig which was about a doctor who performed experiments on himself.

Another science fiction story, The Human Bullet, particularly appealed to me. The character was a little like The Flash in later comics racing a bullet with speed lines. I recall him being sent to another planet where people were disappearing into the strange, roiling alien jungle and nobody knew why. He went there, as fast as a bullet, and he could see that there were people on that planet; the inhabitants moved faster than human beings, and because he could move fast, he could see what was happening. . If you do stop motion camerawork of a plant, it moves, albeit too imperceptibly for human eye. So that strip showed that human beings might be moving so slowly that they couldn’t see faster things moving around them. I only realised subsequently that I was actually being taught about relativity and perception without any didacticism. Stories are not places where you get told what to do. As soon as the story strays into teaching, it loses power, in my view.

There was also a story called Wrath of the Gods, which was a Greek mythological strip produced in colour in the middle pages And I can actually remember particular pictures of the shape-changing god, Proteus. It was drawn by a master, and it was just so exciting. I absolutely adored that.

I also remember little strips, like Billy Binns and his Magical Specs,  Merlo the Magician or Blackbow the Cheyenne, but of course I thought it was 'Blackbow the Chainy' because you don’t read the word the same when you are younger.

Some of these stories may have been carried on in the Eagle but the real point is that my identity had been taken away.

Comics were highly gendered in the 1950s and in some respects children’s literature is more gendered than ever today. Will the DFC appeal to boys and girls?

The DFC is not gendered in the same way that a film studio isn’t gendered. Yes, you have romcoms that might appeal more to the female side, and you have action adventure that might appeal more to the boy side. But actually the characters from these genres flow through all the sexes, don’t they? I mean, I used to read Bunty and Girl; I loved The Four Marys. When you’re told you’ve got to have this because you’re a boy, that’s actually society telling you how you’ve got to be, and it causes a lot of trouble, I think.

Society at the beginning of the 21st century is very different to 1950s society. Is this reflected in the DFC?

Absolutely we have been careful to reflect how our society is now without trying to be overly politically correct.

In what ways do you think comics contributed to your development as a reader?

I got a deep story understanding and sensibility from the reading of comics. They taught me the beginning, middle and end or sometimes what it was not to have an end. I think many people don’t really understand that children are reading and absorbing structure and pattern - the architecture of the story - as much as meaning. Comics taught me so much about the pacing.

British comics have a fast storytelling pace but then I discovered, as an adult, Japanese comics, which move at a much slower pace. Our cultures have very different storytelling techniques. What does that say about the different mentalities of the Japanese, the British and the Americans? I’m always interested in the Finns who apparently speak slower than everybody else on the planet.

Coming from a background in publishing literary fiction for children and teenagers, how did you find the writers and illustrators to work on the DFC?

 I’ve been a children’s book publisher for a long time and I learnt as a young editor that no matter where you look, you can’t recognise writers in the street. You can’t find them in the pub, and you can’t find them at the bus stop; you can’t find them at the library or the school and you can’t even find them at the BBC. So, that taught me that to find a writer you have put up a sign and say “Writers wanted” And they come to you. If you choose and publish good material and then you develop a reputation and better writers start to be attracted to you because they trust your judgment.

So, when I was starting the DFC I knew that all I had to do was put up a big sign saying, “We are going to make a comic, and it’s going to be the best comic anybody’s seen for years.” I announced it as loudly in as many places as I could. There has been tremendous support from people like Philip Pullman, who responded so generously.

Producing a weekly comic can be a huge pressure on writers, illustrators and designers. How do you cope with the demands?

We wanted to conceive something that wouldn’t cause the pressure associated with the weekly production cycle and I could see that if we modelled ourselves on a television or a film studio then it would be workable. I knew we would need to commission more material than we were going to transmit at any one time, so we could fill the comic every week, and not put the pressure on the makers.

It’s no good working hand to mouth, like a Canadian Lake Vole, which has to dive for moss get up for a breath, go down, take a piece of moss, go up for a breath, dive down another yard to get a piece of moss and then mates and dies. It’s disastrous if you get on a treadmill.

We are just a platform for the contributors and we are just trying to make their lives as good as we possibly can. The only reason why we don’t have comics today is because it was impossible for comic creators to make a proper living. It’s not because children don’t like them. It’s not because of television; it’s not because of new technology like the internet. In fact the internet has made this new venture possible.

You’ve opted for distribution exclusively through subscription but is that more of an adult purchase?

Well, the first thing to say is that eventually, we obviously want it to be in every newsagent. This is just a pump priming exercise. The shops are wonderfully supportive of the comic, but they would require us to have a discount structure, and that would mean pricing the comic up to pay for the discount. It’s already shaved to the bone, so we would have to double its price. There’s a big difference between £2 a week and the £5 a week that would make it work for the shops. But if we can get it going on subscription and get a large enough number of children buying it, we can actually print enough to sell it cheaply in the shops as well.

And what does the website contribute to the children’s experience of the DFC?

 I see the DFC as being both its website and its physical entity. We’re physical creatures, and we go into the digital world and we come out of the digital world. And this is why I object when people say it’s reviving the old comic; it definitely isn’t. For children today, the DFC will be a brand new form of entertainment, which they don’t really have at the moment. They will be able to digitally explore and develop the comic online. I love this interaction of the actual physical object with the digital. I don’t see them as enemies.

 I think the old .coms got it completely wrong. They were trying to impersonalise, and the DFC is very personal. It will be addressed personally to an individual kid who will receive it and they will feel part of it.

Importantly, I think, children will actually have a choice made for them, because one of the difficult things about the internet is that there’s so much material that it is difficult to select the best of what it has to offer.

And it’s going to be an advertising free zone….

That’s the point of the subscription model. If we are selling in shops the only way you can make it cheaper is to have advertising and other sources of income.

Comic is a bit of a misnomer: the comics of yesteryear had shades of light and dark. There were quite serious stories as well as the humorous. Is this something we can expect to see in the DFC?

Yes very much so. I want to make our readers laugh and make them cry or make them scared. All the emotions should run through a comic.

 How would you feel if schools started subscribing for class libraries?

I’d love schools to subscribe, but what I don’t want them to do is test people on the comic. It should be joy and delight for the reader, only.

Thank you David Fickling for talking to Write Away