WHOOPEE! No. 500 COVERS

In keeping with the theme of the previous two posts about landmark issues, here is the cover of the alleged issue 500 of WHOOPEE! that in fact was No. 494.

IPC did poorly keeping the count of their issues: the actual No. 500 came out a few weeks later. Here is the unremarkable cover:

All Images 2016 © Egmont UK Ltd.  All rights reserved. Used with permission.

MORE COVERS OF LANDMARK BUSTER NUMBERS

Further to my previous post where I showed the cover of BUSTER No. 1,000, let’s take a look at two other landmark numbers of the comic.

BUSTER No. 500 can be easily identified by simply counting the weeks in the calendar because the first industrial action to affect regular weekly publication schedule didn’t occur until 1970. Here is the cover of issue 500:

… and this is what BUSTER looked like a thousand issues later, behold the cover of No. 1,500:

All Images 2016 © Egmont UK Ltd.  All rights reserved. Used with permission.

HOW MANY ISSUES MAKE THE FULL RUN OF BUSTER COMIC?

Those of you who follow Comics UK Forum may have noticed a recent discussion about the number of issues constituting the full run of BUSTER. You can read the discussion HERE. There you will find a link to download a useful spreadsheet with cover dates and issue numbers, compiled by Forum member hankshanklin.

The important thing about the discussion was that it helped to arrive at the final number of 1,902 individual issues. There was a small debate as to how double-dated issues should be treated, and consensus was that they should be counted as one rather than two.

As a result, I updated my old posts about BUSTER No. 1,000 HERE and HERE because it turned out I had it wrong by one issue through accidentally omitting one number in my spreadsheet... Now it’s official that BUSTER No. 1,000 had the cover-date of 12th January, 1980. It was the last issue before a 4-week break due to industrial action. Here is the cover:

All Images 2016 © Egmont UK Ltd.  All rights reserved. Used with permission.

NAME-THE-INNKEEPER COMPETITION

Here’s an interesting piece of trivia about Scream Inn feature covered in my recent series of X-mas episodes that I thought I might share with you today. Although most if not all Scream Inn spooks had names, this wasn’t the case with Innkeeper, their fiendish boss. It turns out the Editor once had an idea to name him too and asked readers for suggestions. Having had a quick look through my WHOOPEE! collection, I failed to identify the issue where the Editor announced the competition, but results were printed in the number  cover-dated 6th December, 1975. I can’t recall coming across him being referred to as anything else than Innkeeper in the strip though. Another case of “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”, perhaps? :)

  

 

All Images 2016 © Egmont UK Ltd.  All rights reserved. Used with permission.