frbd1-8, Exercise 1: The old chain and its replacement

Model answer (check the details):

The old chain: a story ran in weekly instalments in a magazine such as Tintin, Spirou or Pilote. The magazine paid the artist and built an audience. When the story was finished it was collected into a hardback album, sold in bookshops. The album earned more for the publisher and kept the story in print for decades.

Why it broke down:
- Television, then video games and other leisure, took young readers away from the weeklies from the 1970s.
- Magazines were expensive to produce, and their circulations fell until they could not pay their way (Pilote ended 1989, Tintin magazine 1993, check).
- Adult readers wanted books, not weekly pages, and the album could be sold directly.

What replaced it: albums published first, with no serial, so the bookshop became the main route; one-shot graphic novels; collected editions; and, for some, web publication first.

Care: dates and figures should be checked, and each magazine had its own reasons for closing.