THE HIDDEN NUMBERING OF BUSTER WEEKLIES

Looking through the 1,000th issue of BUSTER I noticed that the coupon for readers to write down three of their favourite strips and send them to the Editor was marked B319:

The coupons in the neighbouring issues also have similar marks so I decided to trace them back to see when and why the numbering was introduced. Here are my findings...

IPC started keeping the number of their BUSTER weeklies from the issue with the cover date of 22nd Sept., 1973 (although the coupon was only marked with the date yet). Why they chose that particular issue for their reference point remains a mystery to me because BUSTER AND JET cover-dated 22nd Sept. 1973 was not remarkable or special in any way. On the other hand, the numbering was clearly intended for internal use to help the editorial team in sorting the coupons chronologically to see which strips were doing better when. In all likelihood they started doing this as soon as they realised it might be convenient and therefore they didn’t need a special issue to assign the first number to.

The first numbered coupon can be found 22 weeks later in BUSTER issue dated 23rd March, 1974 (B22). The practice continued for a while and was abandoned after issue B322 (8th April 1980). Since then (as well as before the numbering was introduced in 1973) the coupons were either unmarked or marked with a date (month and day but not the year). I haven’t checked every issue but I believe the first coupon with a date was in BUSTER of 12th May, 1973.

This ‘momentous' 'discovery’ also solves the puzzle on my original FACEACHE page from the 1978 Christmas issue of BUSTER. Some of you may remember AN OLD POST in which I showed some scans of the artwork and wondered why it was marked ‘No. 262 FLY’. It turns out the piece of paper with the hand-written text is in fact glued to the artwork. Underneath, the original page is marked like this:

No 264 fits nicely into the numbering sequence that starts from the issue of BUSTER dated 22nd Sept., 1973, and the coupon in the BUSTER of 30th Dec., 1978 is appropriately marked B264. I still can’t understand why they had to cut off the corner of FACEACHE original artwork from two weeks before (‘FLY’ episode in B262 dated 16 Dec., 1978) and glue it to the ‘SANTA’ episode:

…and then glue another piece on top of it. That other piece has yet another piece glued to it and you can see “in The Pied Piper” written underneath. ‘The Pied Piper’ was a two-part episode that appeared in BUSTER in the first two weeks of September 1978. They were surely fond of cutting and pasting at IPC…

IPC also numbered the coupons in SHIVER AND SHAKE weeklies but I haven’t found evidence they did that in other IPC children’s comics at the time. They definitely reintroduced the practice in TAMMY in the late 70s.