There's an idea - "the kids sure like Goosebumps/Are You Afraid Of The Dark and our rival's Are You Afraid Of The Dark/Goosebumps, what if we did a British one based on this horror comic with the sexy woman on it?"
There just didn't seem to be as much stuff that was as readily accessible, which I guess is a consistent theme you've driven at throughout this series and beyond. What do you think, having done all this research? Is it other stuff pushing the homegrown comics - whether for boys, girls or otherwise - off the stands at the newsagents or is was it the internal machinations within the British comics business?
The reason most of the homegrown stuff died is a perfect storm of:
a) Companies not really caring too much for too long - it was the cheap stuff for kids that made money, why pay more than you had to? (Marvel UK was the only dedicated
comic company) This leads to bad working practices and a failure to notice the market had changed, and unlike American comics the British stuff didn't have a large direct market to sneak into
b) Creators being treated like crap. So why stay in British comics when books or TV or American/European comics were giving you a better deal?
c) Competition from American comics, which were getting easier and easier for British kids to get and in their 'uncut' form
d) Competition from non-comics. That undercut sales, which can be dealt with (it's not like
books have died out despite TV, video games, and streaming) but then we're back to a) and b)
The reason so little old stuff was available goes back to a) - Egmont Fleetway and DC Thomson didn't care, except for a few exceptions like the old Classics From The Comics reprint monthly or the usual Dredd paperbacks. Sonic the Comic went on for years and no trades (except I think one of early strips) for readers who'd missed anything or lost their issues, and if that was the case for a huge seller then what chance does Janus Stark or Jinty or Jonah have? Titan Books did a few trades of other old stuff but they're just one company; Hibernia Press did a few titchy small reprints (the only chance you'll read Doomlord now!) but that's a small outfit.
It's only in the last four years that's changed, after Rebellion basically bought half of Fleetway's back catalogue (and bought the other half in the last year!). Now American comics used to be terrible with this too, especially Marvel, but consider that before 2016 you couldn't get a trade paperback of Misty
at all, it's only
this year you can get one of Trigan Empire despite it being a huge thing for a whole generation of comic folks. Even now, DC Thomson doesn't bother, you're not going to see a trade paperback of classic Bash Streets or Dennis the Menace or Beryl the Peril
EDIT: put it another way, Carlos Ezquerra died in 2017, not long after news came out that El Mestizo, one of his personal fave projects, would finally be collected the next year. Could you imagine if Jack Kirby or someone like that died in 2017 and one of their favourite strips, the one they kept talking about, a thing that kept coming up as having been a big deal in some way (one of the first black leads in a British comic) was
not collected by then? But until Rebellion nabbed the rights, nobody cared or thought there was a market.