Showing posts with label krash. Show all posts
Showing posts with label krash. Show all posts

Aug 4, 2011

Let's talk about Australian Kids' Magazines.

All the images from this article
are from Krash #91. Krash is
known for its subtle covers.

As I pointed out in an earlier article there exists in Australia a wide range of magazines for children that celebrate and, let's be honest, shill youth pop culture. These are some of the only comics-related material produced exclusively in Australia for Australian children. They're available everywhere, and sell quite well.

Each one is filled to the brim with articles that barely hide the fact that they're actually advertisements for the most popular pop culture of the day. They're written directly to kids, they're colourful, and they're about things kids care about.

Also, they generally have comic pages as a backup in them! Actually that's probably stretching things. Most of them have a very small, teenie-tiny number of comic pages in the back of the issue, usually something like 6 pages of comics in a 100 page magazine.

The magazines are, frankly, incredibly crass. They try to write to kids on their own level, using 'young slang', and writing things in a way that sounds awesome and cool! Often using words like awsm and kewl. The result is that they're kind low on the literacy scales, and very hard to read if you're not 10.