ALMOST THERE WITH MY SPARKY COLLECTION!

I’ll do some bragging today because recently I received a joblot of Sparky comics from 1966 and filled all of my gaps for the year. This means that my mission of collecting a full set of this interesting and scarce title is nearly complete. I am now only one number (No. 620 with the cover date of 4th December, 1976) away from being able to call myself a proud owner of one of the very few full sets that exist out there. I also need a complete copy of issue No. 110 (25th February, 1967) because mine has its centre pages missing.  Do let me know if you have spare copies of Nos. 620 and 110 to sell or swap!

The picture below shows the 4 boxes which hold my Sparky collection. All comics are bagged and boarded, two magazines per bag, one on each side of the board.

To celebrate the achievement, here’s a gallery of some landmark Sparky covers for you to enjoy:

First issue:

First cover with Sparky the character:

First Moonsters cover; they also changed the colour pattern of the logo starting from this issue; Moonsters covers are my favourite ones:

First issue with a new logo; Sparky the character returns to the front cover, ousting Moonsters to the back page:

New logo; first Barney Bulldog cover:

First issue with another new logo:

…and then another new logo:

…and finally the premiere of the last logo (a remarkably uninspired cover design, don't you think?..):

First Mummies cover:

Final issue:

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.