The problem there is Roy, naming the strip on the title character. I think having the comic be about a team the focus can change more and characters depart or change role (a player that becomes a coach or manager later). I good writer can make something out of anything, while a bad writer can have the greatest situation set up and make a sow's ear of it.

Took longer than I expected.

The Direct Market saved comics, as their newsstand presence had dwindled dramatically; but, it also locked them into a short-term fix. You can only go so far, marketing towards collectors, as any hobby industry will tell you. You need new blood and comic shops were not great vehicles for that, especially with too many owners who were fans first, and businessmen 12th. Too many ignored a wider audience because they didn't like those comics. Good luck finding Archie Comics in your average comic shop; but, you could almost always find them in a grocery store, and there were a lot more of them.

Bookstores should have been targeted a decade earlier and book collections more seriously. Fireside did well with their stuff; but, DC and Marvel took a long time to do much.

Louise Simonson pushed for doing something like Harlequin, to tap into a potential romance comic market; but, it seemed to fall of deaf ears. Romance comics used to be huge things and when they, funny animals and other girl favorites started disappearing, so did most of the girls. Manga proved that they are a big audience, if you give them characters and stories that have more appeal than skimpy costumes and damsels in distress.

In the U.S. and Canada general retailers had no real control over what comics they got in their shops, they got a bundle of comics off a truck from a supplier every week to put out. Sometimes they would have put say a bunch of Thor #291 out one month and next month they wouldn't even get a single copy of #292. They were a very low mark-up and low profit item and treated more by weight you could say (not literally but in terms of bundles being loaded and unloaded thought of like that by the distributors). It was a bit different in the '30s and '40s but by the '50s comic books were interchangeable cheap junk alongside paperback books, dump a mess of them out and some will sell and the rest the retailer got a credit for. This is why there were the attempts at more expensive formats in the '70s to try to find something retailers and distributors could care about that made a decent mark-up per unit not to be treated as bundles.

In England I've heard people my age and younger mention being able to have their paper shop or newsagents save them their copy of certain titles which was the case in North America maybe in a few places still in the early '50s. I think they could say at an individual shop level we want this many Eagles and Beanos, or this many Look-Ins and Doctor Who Monthlys, oddly it was the import U.S. comics that were sold in job lots often. They kept a system of service that was reactive to the customer whereas in America it wasn't worth the bother and kids could take what was offered. That's why the comic shops took off as a distribution system as at the very least they were reactive to their customers, they wouldn't take 6 House Of Mystery and 6 New Teen Titans like the spinner rack general non-specialist merchant, they'd take maybe 2 House Of Mystery and 40 New Teen Titans, plus with the non-returnable aspect it seemed a win-win for publisher, seller and reader.

Now however we have schemes like the you get this one rare variant cover only if you take 200 regular editions exploiting the collectors (how ever many are left) and undermining the retailers and the foundation of a system that originally was about taking care of and providing quality. Someone always comes along to get the short term profit at the long term sustainability expense.

I can't see Harlequin type romance comics really being all that big of a thing, but as an aspect of something not overtly labelled Love or Romance in the old style... like Twilight fantasy I guess, or Archie single character-centered titles it could work. I think the same is true for Westerns or Jungle adventure stuff, it's day is truly done outside a retro/ironic pastiche. Harlequins in my experience are still read by women about ten years older than me and up. Sports and martial arts comics would mostly be aimed at young males, the sort who read sports magazines, but girls might read about figure skaters, dancers and gymnasts as they do in Japan, not sure for tennis and volleyball which I also remember from Margaret Weekly. But the real back-bone is to have comics for little kids. Chances are if someone hasn't seen or read comics by the time they are six they will not suddenly start picking them up avidly at sixteen. Perhaps we should be doing all we can to keep something like Owly or Yam going, or paper doll comics where kids can design stuff and see their name in print maybe? Roy Of The Rovers may not be a pinnacle of the sequential pictorial narrative, but it served as an accessible entry point for a certain age of reader, a solid product for retailers to offer, and hopefully they both got something of quality and value from it. The closest thing in the U.S. I can think of would be the once very popular war comics. I remember boys that didn't care about superheroes or comic books otherwise would read a Sgt. Rock, Sgt. Fury or Unknown Soldier.

I've never really religiously read a sports comic.. because they're all exactly the same (that goes for the movies too)... the manga ones have a very specific formula that I have found mind numbingly boring every time I tried.

The comics-as-biography ones I have alot more interest in.. the Roberto Clemente one was great, as was the recent Muhammad Ali one.

Would Southern Bastards count as a sports comic? If so, it's the best one ever for sure.

Can't say I'm very interested in sports comics - outside of a few Strange Sports stories I've read - or comics in which the main characters are some kind of pro athletes, but I have read a few, among them these two:

This was a labor of love by Trevor von Eeden, and it's more of a biography (although with some fictionalized aspects) of Jack Johnson himself, which highlights his significance not only to pro boxing, but also to the history of race relations in the US.