Cracked

Some scans in this article contain racist caricatures.

Shortly after the closure of Buzz, D. C. Thomson decided to have another go at launching a new weekly humour comic for children. It would do things a bit differently from its immediate predecessor: whereas Buzz had been in A3 size, the new comic would be A4, allowing it to boast 32 pages of comics and features. Although it didn't have a regular cover star, instead featuring a large splash panel promoting the characters within, it would feature a character that did not really have a strip of his own, but rather served as the comic's host, not dissimilar to some titles by rival publisher Fleetway of the time. It would prioritise gags, and lots of them, and include several points of reader interactivity.

The first issue of Cracker was on the shelves in January 1975, just two weeks after the conclusion of Buzz, but this title was destined to have an even shorter run: just 87 issues, across twenty months.

I have an issue from just after the halfway point here, number #51, and -- along with some examples of stories that had already been phased out by this point -- I'm going to well and truly scan it in.

Songs in the Key of Doom

This is the first of the four maps you use to navigate the Ghastly Kingdom of the Dead in the third GrailQuest gamebook, Gateway of Doom. You start in room 65, the one with the four secret doors, and will eventually want to make your way over to 80, where you will find a map showing the remainder of Level I.

As you may have noticed, you can't get to 80 without passing through 100 no matter what route you take, and in 100 there's an unavoidable fight with a monster who is guarding a chest containing the key to the Gateway into the Ghastly Kingdom, which you need in order to close and lock it at the conclusion of the book, so stopping the spread of monsters and plagues and whatnot passing through the Gateway into Avalon.

Buzz Words

In January 1973, D. C. Thomson launched a new weekly humour comic for children into a market that already looked pretty crowded; they were already producing the Beano, Dandy, Beezer, Topper and Sparky at the time, and to introduce a sixth comic into this mix seems ambitious. Like its stablemates the Beezer and Topper, Buzz was published in A3 size, making it twice the size of many other comics of the time, but this didn't mean it would be a big hit: just two years and 103 issues later, Buzz would become the publisher's first mayfly when it closed.

A mayfly which I am now about to pin and mount to the wall. (I don't think that's what you do with mayflies, but just go with it.) The issue I have scanned in is from just over halfway through its life, number #59.

Coach and Horses

The second Lone Wolf gamebook, Fire on the Water, is quite heavy on setting up the series' lore, and features an expansive plot where Lone Wolf must travel halfway across the Lastlands to retrieve the fabled Sommerswerd. Perhaps because of this, there are a few moments where it seems to struggle to fit everything into 350 sections.

During one sequence, you travel by coach to Port Bax, with five other passengers -- Ganon and Dorier, two brothers who are knights in the Order of the White Mountain; Halvorc, a merchant; Parsion, a priest; and Viveka, a young adventuress for hire. The journey is interrupted by your discovery that one of the five is an assassin in the pay of the Darklords; after you survive an attempt to serve you a tray of poisoned food during a stopover at a tavern, you storm into the bar where they are all waiting, are asked which one you think is your would-be killer, and do battle with them. (Take a look at the illustration that accompanies this section, and you should be able to spot the vital clue as to who the Darklord agent is even without the context of the rest of the book. Even the picture above might be enough.)

Hot to Go!

Snip and Snap, D. C. Thomson's original duo of postman-pillorying dogs, enjoyed a stint in the Sparky for just shy of two years, from October 1972 to August 1974.

As you may have immediately guessed from other posts I've done on this subject recently, for a brief spell beginning in the summer of 1999, the twosome were dusted off, colourised and reprinted in the Dandy as the Red Hot Chilli Dogs:

Knock on Wood

This is the very first edition of The Haunted Wood, a strip which appeared in Fleetway's Knockout across its two-year run from June 1971 to June 1973. Like some other Fleetway strips of the time, it does not appear to have had a terribly consistent artist; some sources say this first strip was the work of Reg Parlett, other strips were apparently by Sid Burgon, and other editions have artists who cannot be identified. (Another Knockout strip, Beat Your Neighbour, is notorious for being so inconsistent it can be difficult to find two editions which were definitely drawn by the same person, but that's another story.)

To cut to the chase: The Haunted Wood is not renowned for experimentation or breaking its format. Every subsequent edition follows a very familiar set-up: someone takes wood from the Haunted Wood, doesn't listen to the unnamed boy's warnings that this will lead to disaster, and the haunted wood, no matter what form it has been sawed, nailed or whittled into, comes to life and wreaks havoc until it returns to its home.

Red Lines

This is a very early example of Ali's Baba, a strip which appeared in D. C. Thomson's Sparky from January 1970 up until the comic's end in July 1977; it was drawn by Malcolm "Mal" Judge, better known for D. C. stablemates such as The Numskulls and Billy Whizz. This particular strip is taken from the Sparky Book 1971; the Christmas books were usually finished at least a year before publication, and Baba and his guardian angel must have just sneaked in before the deadline to debut in the weekly comic and the accompanying annual in the same year.

In this particular strip, Ali's invisibility to the other characters is represented by making him transparent. Which seems fair enough. However, it appears very unlikely this method was used in any other strip.

For the vast majority of editions (this example is from the 1973 book),¹ they did something more interesting -- having the outline of Ali and his speech balloons appear in colour:

Fight! Fight! Fight!

In March 1983, the very third Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Forest of Doom, was published in the UK.

I'm aware it's a story I've told several times now, but the range's co-creators, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, had jointly written the first book in the series, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, which was an instant bestseller. To produce two new books in the same time it had taken to write Warlock, they divided their efforts, and Livingstone's first solo gamebook, Forest, was published the exact same day as Jackson's offering, The Citadel of Chaos. Four more books would be written in this way before Puffin Books realised that if they were going to keep up with public demand, and the copycat series by other publishers that were beginning to crop up, they were going to have to open things up to outside writers.

As you might expect, Livingstone doesn't have everything down pat at this point, and Forest is a bit different to his later books. It's generally a bit easier, especially when it comes to combats. The basic plot is still on the simple side, and an excuse for a classic dungeon crawler (albeit one that takes place outdoors). One of the most notable curiosities is that if you reach the end of the book having failed to find both parts of the fabled Dwarven warhammer you're trying to retrieve from Darkwood Forest, you can loop straight back round to section 1 and continue playing (provided you can pass a Test Your Luck roll to escape some Wild Hill Men); presumably Livingstone took it as read that the player would follow paths not taken on the second time round, but there's still going to be some overlap with areas where the forest apparently magically resets itself between visits.