Cityport Knocking

In 1982, the British games designer Steve Jackson co-writes the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. His masterstroke is a puzzle requiring three numbered keys you have to find to unlock the Warlock's treasure chest; use the wrong keys and unlocking the chest is impossible, or even fatal!

Jackson has an interesting -- not to mention highly ambitious -- tactic of cheat-proofing his gamebooks like this by requiring the player to take options that are not directly given by the text. He went on to use a not dissimilar puzzle, but with intergalactic coordinates, in Starship Traveller. He put a secret room in House of Hell. Appointment with F.E.A.R. has multiple possible solutions depending on which superpower you choose to play with. He throws the literal kitchen sink at Creature of Havoc, with multiple examples of reference modifiers to allow the reader to take a nonstandard action, and even going so far as to make up a cipher which all English language directed at the player is initially given in, which the player can't decode at first.

Without really meaning to, I have written about nearly all these elaborate puzzles Jackson came up with to ensure that only someone playing the book fairly could beat it.

Except for one.

Bright Spark

The above is a typical example of We Are the Sparky People, a strip which appeared in the DC Thomson comic Sparky for around two thirds of its 1965-77 run. Drawn by Jim Petrie (better known as the artist for 2,000 editions of Minnie the Minx in the Beano), WAtSP was a metafictional workplace comedy based around a fictionalised version of the Sparky office staff; other fourth-wall-breaking strips where the characters would interact with the comic's writers and artists would appear before and after this in various DCT comics, but the Sparky People were unique in depicting the ongoing adventures of the people actually putting the comic together.

The Sparky People also appeared, of course, in the annual Sparky Christmas book. The annuals would always be dated with the year ahead, so the Sparky Book 1976, pictured above, was published in mid-to-late 1975. They were also in a near-constant state of production and had extremely long lead times, each book typically being finished a whole year ahead of schedule -- so the 1976 Book would actually have been completed by around summer 1974. This would cause the occasional oddity; it wasn't unusual for a strip which had been dropped from the weekly comic to show up in the annual quite some time later. (I understand that these days, the Beano and Dandy annuals are no longer produced quite so far in advance.)

And this particular book contains, via the Sparky People, perhaps the only joke ever made in one of these annuals about their long lead times.