The shrinking of the comics industry persisted long after the 3-Day Week had gone. Something was happening.
After the contraction, I had assumed that there would be an expansion; but through the summer of 1974 the contraction of the industry continued, as more comics merged.
The realization came to me, that the entire children’s comics industry was going to fail.

As I lay in the bath, my dear sweet waterlogged jollyboat bobbed to the surface, and I saw that its prow was decorated with a rash: I realized that my nervous system must be under stress.
My journey had been a crazed rush downriver through raging whitewater and plunging rapids, with potshots at me from the banks.
None of this had been foreseen by me when I began the journey.
How would it end? Would I find myself stuck in a swamp with clinging leeches, or would I break free? And if I broke free, would I find myself in clear blue water, or would I see an enemy gunboat bearing down on me, to the soundtrack of an oompah band?

From the beginning, with my comics creations I had brought into being a comedy world of uncertainty; but I hadn’t foreseen that my comics career would itself enter a world of uncertainty.
I had realized from early in my childhood, that even the most certain attachments of gravity could be upset by sudden gusts of wind.
Yet I hadn’t foreseen this collapse.
I had thought that the grand parade would last forever. At my creation of Little Plum for The Beano in April 1953, I felt exultation: This is the one. This will make my career.
The creation of Minnie the Minx in September of the same year, then Bash Street the following month, was a triumphant procession; but there was no one to whisper in my ear: All this will pass.
During the years of the grand parade of the motley, I had been too immersed in the close focus of creation and drawing, for me to look up and recognize the causes of what was to come.

Now, in the summer of 1974, I cast back in my mind. I had created and drawn for all of the three great comics companies in turn.
I thought back over the industry.
What were the causes of collapse?
There were several, in combine.
Firstly, there was the failure of the comics industry to ally itself with new technologies, to break out into new markets: I had created Little Plum, Minnie the Minx and The Bash Street Kids in 1953.
Two years later, in 1955, commercial television came into being.
Secondly, there was the matter of the ‘selling pages’. There have been many stylish comics artists; but the artists producing the selling pages have been few.
You couldn’t very well sell a comic that was a single sheet of paper; nevertheless readers could essentially buy a comic on the strength of one feature.
In my own times with the comics industry, it turned out that my creations, my drawings, were the selling pages.
To seize and hold a readership required the investment of passion and intensity; this investment provoked a like passion and intensity of response from the readers.
Intense drawing requires all of the organism: the faculties of the mind and body working as one.
At the heart of this is the nervous system. It is the nervous system in perfect union with the workings of the mind and the motor skills of the body which is at the heart of creativity; by the same token it is the nervous system which bears the brunt.
There was a paradox in the relationship between a freelance artist and the editor of a comic.
In reality I was dealing with large corporate entities. Yet there was illusion.
As an artist you are dealing face to face with one man, an editor. Thus it becomes personal; and because this one man’s career, his livelihood, depends on what you as an artist produce, what do you do when you receive pleas for help from this man, asking for more?
The desperate pressure from a corporate entity for still more and yet more from the artist drawing the selling pages, worked against the very intensity in the drawings which seized and held the readership.
That pressure brought a permanent collision between intensity of creative input, and scale of output, the scale of industrial production.
Then, thirdly, there was the seeking by the industry to seize the copyrights of the creators, the artists, and thus to take from the artists control over their lives and work.
These forces, by exerting relentless pressure on the artists who produced the selling pages, the artists who created was at the heart of the industry, blew away the industry.