The correct answer to the question I asked
in my previous post about BUSTER issue dated February 16th, 1980 is that it happens
to be the one thousandth edition of the title. This is not mentioned on the
cover or anywhere inside, and in all likelihood IPC were unaware that it was their
landmark number, or they would have exploited this for promotion purposes.
EDIT 11th January, 2016: some new information has recently come to my attention and it turns out that BUSTER No. 1000 actually had the cover date of 12th January, 1980. The cover and some comments are provided in this post HERE. This proves once again that researching old comics is an ongoing and live process :)
EDIT 11th January, 2016: some new information has recently come to my attention and it turns out that BUSTER No. 1000 actually had the cover date of 12th January, 1980. The cover and some comments are provided in this post HERE. This proves once again that researching old comics is an ongoing and live process :)
Differently from DC Thomson, Fleetway and IPC didn’t number their comics and we
know they weren’t very good at keeping their count accurate, as illustrated by
the example of WHOOPEE! dated November 5th, 1983 that was celebrated as No. 500 although in fact it was the 494th weekly edition published in the 504th
week of publication.
BUSTER No. 1,000 came out in the 1,029th
week of publication. The whole run of BUSTER consists of 1,902 issues published
over a period of 1,984 weeks. The last 45 editions were fortnightlies; from
1994 onwards bumper X-mas editions covered a period of two weeks each; there were two
double-dated issues in 1970 and the industrial action/production difficulties of
the 70s and the 80s (to a lesser extent) are responsible for the remaining part
of the deficit.
The same sort of thing happened with Whizzer & Chips, although, given the circumstances, it's understandable as to why. The 21st Anniversary ish of the comic came and went unheralded. The very next week, the last issue was published before the title merged with Buster. Don't suppose there's much point in celebrating 21 years when you know that the next issue is going to be the last one.
ReplyDeleteWell, in the case of Buster the end was still two decades away! I think they simply didn't now this was their 1000th edition.
DeleteIs it a pure coincidence that very soon after there was the first real logo change Buster had ever had? Sure, the original logo had been elongated, stretched and compacted various times since 1960, but the orange logo with broken white lines within was new – and incidentally roughly the point I became a reader. 1980 had been a bit hit-and-miss before this point, with gaps in the run and more to come.
ReplyDeleteIndeed! They introduced the new logo merely a couple of weeks later on 8th March, 1980.
DeleteInteresting to read that Whoopee’s 500th edition, wasn’t. That’d mean there were 567 editions, rather than the 573 I’d always thought. Yes, I’m that sad! Don’t see what was so special about celebrating with the Guy Fawkes mask. They blew the dust off it every year!
ReplyDeleteThe link given in the update (http://kazoop.blogspot.lt/?zx=fc680f6f7041cfc5) does not work. You may want to change this to (http://kazoop.blogspot.com/2016/01/how-many-issues-make-full-run-of-buster.html) so that the link works. :)
ReplyDelete