Curse of the Numbers

I have found myself writing quite a lot about Fighting Fantasy of late, and one recurring element has come up: The use of items or clues with numbers associated with them that allow the reader to take a nonstandard action not expressly given by the text. So, for example, in House of Hell you can find a key with the number '27' inscribed on it; when you find a door you want to try and unlock with it, you should take the number of the section you are on at the time, deduct the key's number and turn to that numbered reference. All of the recent examples I've written about come from early entries of the series, so I thought I'd look at the fifty-ninth and final entry of the original Puffin series, Curse of the Mummy, where author Jonathan Green perhaps takes the idea to its logical extreme.

From the Topper

This is the cover of the 1968 edition of The Topper Book, the annual super-sized hardback edition of the weekly British humour comic. As is frequently the case for comics annuals, it depicts several of the weekly Topper characters together -- the different strips rarely crossed over, and getting to see all the comic's characters in the same scene was very much the Infinity War of its day -- but one of those characters is not like the others.

That's because one of them is Nancy, whose syndicated daily comic strip has appeared in American newspapers since the 30th October, 1938, initially written and drawn by Ernie Bushmiller (with the authorship changing hands a number of times since Bushmiller's death in 1982), and which also appeared in the Topper by way of reprints of those strips from its first issue in 1953 up until the late 1970s.

As far as I can tell, Nancy was one of only two cases of an American newspaper daily being transplanted into a British humour comic in this way, and was presumably chosen because she didn't clash with the other strips in the Topper; Mutt and Jeff ran in the Topper's sister publication the Beezer in 1962, but this does not appear to have been a great success, as it was phased out after about a year. (Nancy started out as a "topper", which in American newspaper comics is a second comic integrated into the larger Sunday strip, but that just seems to be an amusing coincidence.) The cover of the 1968 Topper Book was the only time Nancy was featured in a cover illustration alongside other, original characters from the comic, and looks like it may have been done by a DC Thomson artist directly tracing over some original Bushmiller art; it's interesting to note that she made it onto the cover of the book with the comic's most popular and recognisable characters, ahead of Topper originals such as Nick Kelly.

Chaos Theory

In March 1983, the very second Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Citadel of Chaos, was published in the UK. Having each written one half of the first book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone divided their labours for the next books, and Citadel was Jackson's solo effort; Livingstone's offering, The Forest of Doom, was released the very same day.

The Citadel of Chaos is an unusual gamebook in many ways. There's the original cover art pictured above, for one thing, which was the subject of much criticism for its low quality (it isn't even clear what the monster in the foreground is meant to be, as it doesn't match any of the creatures in the game); it was provided by an artist credited only as 'Emmanuel', who has very few other professional credits to their name and about whom we know practically nothing. It became one of the very few Fighting Fantasy covers to be entirely replaced during the original series' 1982-95 lifespan, with the replacement coming from range stalwart Ian Miller, who also provided the covers for several other entries by Jackson and worked on the range right up until it was cancelled by Puffin Books.

It's also an unusual, possibly unique, book in that even if you roll the lowest possible numbers when calculating your statistics, you still have a very good chance of managing to beat the game, primarily because there is only one mandatory combat in the whole thing, and very few other STAMINA penalties outside of combat or stat checks. It only once uses Jackson's signature tactic of having items or clues with numbers associated with them that allow you to take an option not expressly given by the text, in a relatively simple way; the combination to a lock is written down somewhere and you have to turn to that number section when prompted. That isn't to say it's an easy gamebook to beat by any means -- in particular the Puzzle Boss approach to the final encounter with the master of the Citadel, Balthus Dire is excellently engineered. It's a good challenge that never reaches the hair-tearing levels of frustration some of Jackson's other books could provoke.

No Cigar

In late 1979, the Dandy Book 1980 was published in time for the Christmas market. This was the 42nd straight year such a thing had happened, and I don't have much to say about the event itself. But contained within the book is a Desperate Dan story where, put off at the prospect of paying 50 dollars for a box of six Christmas crackers (where he found a shop in the Wild West selling Christmas crackers is another matter), he decides to make his own super-crackers and, to cut a long story short, the punchline of the whole thing involves him smoking a cigar.

We must now leave 1979 behind for 1990, and the publication of the Desperate Dan Book 1991. Dan was actually relatively recently installed as the Dandy's cover star, taking over from Korky the Cat in November 1984, and this was the first of three 90s annuals he received, following one-offs in the 50s and 70s; Dennis the Menace, the Bash Street Kids, Beryl the Peril and Bananaman were also on the hallowed list of DC Thomson characters popular enough to receive their own dedicated annual.

With the exception of the Bananaman ones, which were all-new (as they tied into the TV series and not the comic strip, but that's another kettle of fish), these character-specific annuals featured a smattering of new material but were principally made up of reprints from past years and various sources, recoloured and with the speech bubbles redone to bring them up to date but otherwise unaltered. And for the first latter-day Desperate Dan Book, the aforementioned story from the Dandy Book 1980 was recycled.

But here the book runs into a problem. Smoking has seemingly become a bit more of a taboo, at least in children's comics, in the eleven years since then, and the original version of the story isn't going to be acceptable. The offending object only appears in the last page and a half, and it seems a shame for a perfectly good, Christmas-themed story that will take up twelve pages to be rendered completely unusable when you only have to alter a few panels. So the cigar is going to have to be changed to something else. Something that looks like a cigar (since the last panel in particular really boxes you in), and allows you to come up with an alternative punchline. But what?

That Letter, That Letter, and That Letter

In the Red Dwarf episode "Bodyswap", originally broadcast on BBC Two on 5 December 1989, Lister (who has temporarily swapped bodies with Rimmer) and Cat are playing a game of Scrabble:

CAT: Hey-hey-hey! I've got you now, buddy! [He holds up his letter rack.] J-O-Z-X-Y-Q-K.

LISTER: That's not a word!

CAT: It's a Cat word!

LISTER: "Jozxyqk"?

CAT: That's not how you pronounce it!

LISTER: What's it mean?

CAT: It's the sound you make when you get your sexual organs trapped in something. "Jozxyqk!"

LISTER: Is it in the dictionary?

CAT: Well, it could be. If you were reading in the nude and you closed the book too quick. [He mimes this.] "Jozxyqk!"

An Adventure of the Far Future

In September 1983, the fourth Fighting Fantasy gamebook, Starship Traveller, hit the shelves of all good booksellers, and quite possibly some of the bad ones too. At this early stage in the franchise's history, creators Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were still the sole writers working on the range (a year later outside writers would be brought in when it became apparent that the series' popularity meant new titles were needed faster than two men alone could possibly write them), and Jackson, having already written or co-written two high fantasy-based books, took an early opportunity to experiment: Starship Traveller is the first of several science fiction FF entries; the influences of Star Trek are most obvious, but references to Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, among others, are also present. (Later editions of the book also included a notice on the copyright page stating the book was not in any way related to the American role-playing game Traveller, which had caused some minor controversy when it was first published!)