What she wants in a comic…

I asked Niamh this morning, what exactly she’d like to see in a comic – I thought I’d better research the audience first hand. I’d also like to say that I haven’t promted her responses, and she is still thinking about it, so I may add to this later on…

The very first thing she said was ‘funny’, this seemded to be very important and a main component for her. I imagine this is the same for most nine year olds looking at the popularity of The Beano.

She also listed the following:
Exciting; lots of adventures; serial stories; cliff-hangers; lots of different characters; stories about new films; and competitions.

I asked her what type of story would she like to read, she answered:
Fantasy worlds; historical stories (she likes books about the war, “Horrible Histories” etc.); spy stories; super-heroes (and super-hero-animals!); a range of different settings, adventures and stories; a mixture of characters (some naughty, she said grinning); crazy nonsense stories – she started spouting some very surreal stuff here (she’s full of good ideas), which put me in mind of “Hewligan’s haircut”… I must re-read that now!

She also thought it would be good to have story reviews, where children and editors can comment – she’s thinking online now. Plus, she’d quite like the comic to be themed sometimes, I’m not sure how that would work, but she’d like it.

I asked if she’d like to see re-print of stories that I used to read… She loved this idea and ran off to find me a recent copy of The Beano in which they’d done just that… maybe we could bring back “The Four Mary’s” etc. after all!

She seems to know what she wants.