The Perils of Cliff Hanger

The above is a typical specimen of Cliff Hanger, the British comics character who enjoyed a four-year stint in Fleetway Publications' Buster from 1983 to 1987 with a strip that was part comic, part adventure gamebook. Trust me, I'm just as surprised as you that it's taken me over eight years to write about this.

When readers first encountered Cliff in June 1983, he was watching his favourite television show, Now Get Out of This (a parody of the genuine gameshow Now Get Out of That) and unwisely proclaimed that if he could get on the show, he bet he could get out of anything -- which two agents of the Mysterious Evil Spies Society, who happened to be overhearing him at the time, took as an invitation to zap him into various traps they wanted to test to see if they were good enough to use against genuine secret agents.

Every week, Cliff would thus get teleported into a situation of catastrophic danger that frequently had some relation to what he was doing when the Evil Spies blasted him with their matter transmitter ray (or any of the other different rays they had access to, leading to the running joke "Don't call me Ray!"), and at the end of his page there would be three options as to what he should do next. The reader should tick one of the boxes and then turn to elsewhere in the issue (usually a boxout included on the letters page) to see if they chose the right option. The possible resolutions to the above strip are as follows:

Cliff's predecessor had been a superhero-themed strip called Master Mind (civilian identity: schoolboy Alf Witt, who transformed into Master Mind by proclaiming the magic word "Pass!"); both were the creation of artist J. Edward Oliver, and MM launched in late 1980 and finished only a month before Cliff made his debut. The conceit of Master Mind was that it was part comic strip, part puzzle page; each week a puzzle (anything from a maze to a logical thinking puzzle, or from a brainteaser to a spot-the-difference, or anything else you might be able to think of) would be incorporated into the story somehow, and the reader could help Master Mind save the day by solving the puzzle.

It may not be a coincidence that Cliff replaced this strip less than a year after The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was published and popularised the concept of gamebooks in the UK.

In the course of Cliff's original run, Oliver would frequently experiment with the format -- sometimes he would include puzzles, harkening back to his previous strip, there were a few serialised stories over several issues (which sometimes had more than one choice to make per strip, accomplished by printing part of the main strip upside-down, and would often have the Evil Spies take a backseat in favour of homaging current film and TV franchises), or for special occasions such as Christmas issues or the annual Buster Book, he would turn the strip into a fully playable board game. A few times, though, he really pushed the boat out in the form of a complete Choose Your Own Adventure story for Cliff, such as this one from the 1987 Book:

Some of you may recall Cliff as appearing in Buster significantly later than 1987. That's because after his run finished, it was reprinted from around mid-1992 until near the comic's end in 1999 (although there was some new material published during this time alongside the reprints, some of which we'll come to imminently); Fleetway had a policy that any reprinted material had to be at least five years old, so waiting until all the strips were available to repeat may well have been a factor. These reruns colourised the originally monochrome strips, and also made some other changes... which are pretty interesting, but I don't think anyone has really noticed them before now. Perhaps the best way to showcase them is by showing the Doctor Who-themed strip originally printed in the issue dated 10th January 1987:

And here is the rerun, from the issue dated 16th October 1993 (I didn't have this issue to hand myself, so this is taken from the Internet Archive upload):

Perhaps because the strip was getting difficult to write, a few of the ones from near the end weren't quite so interactive, and JEO has taken the opportunity to add in a choice, and two new "wrong decision" panels, for the reprint in this case. Additionally, later strips took suggestions from readers for predicaments Cliff could find himself in, and the references to this have been excised from the repeat. (I would also draw your attention to the entirely unnecessary UK Gold reference added to the first panel.) One other change is the addition of the "Only You Can Save Cliff Hanger!" banner, which became a hallmark of the series; it may have been added in part because when the strips originally ran Buster was printed in a smaller format, and they needed something to fill out the extra space.

There was one other giveaway that these were reruns: J. Edward Oliver drew the strip's number on Cliff's jacket -- so in the very first strip Cliff prominently had a large number '1' on his chest, then '2', and so on and so forth. Exceptions to this were strips where Cliff just happened to never be illustrated from the front or was otherwise obscured, he was wearing something completely different or, in one case, the entire strip took place in pitch darkness; in these cases Oliver would usually manage to slip the strip number in somewhere else.

Also taken from the Internet Archive upload, see if you can spot where JEO has hidden the number here. (The correct answer is B; at the beginning of the race, Cliff wakes up with a start.)

You may also note Cliff's jacket is unnumbered in the earlier Buster Book story, as only the regular strips in the weekly comic contributed to this count. (The number in the final regular edition in 1987 was 197, should you be interested.) Other recurring motifs included mysterious boxes with crank handles on them, pictures of warthogs, products from the Acme Corporation in homage to Looney Tunes, an arrow with another arrow pointing the opposite way within, and signs reading "Abolish Tuesdays".

In October 1992, not long after it had first started reprinting the weekly strips, one of the Choose Your Own Adventure-style stories ran in the weekly Buster in 'cut out and keep' format (I believe it was newly produced for the occasion); once you'd collected the pull-outs from all five issues, you could fold them together into a 20-page booklet, and only then you could play the complete adventure. One or two other new appearances were slipped in amongst the repeats between '92 and '97; mostly these were small cameos, although one is a full-page strip where the number on Cliff's jacket is a nice round 200. The strip in question rapidly becomes a Hostile Show Takeover from J. Edward's wackiest creation, Crazy Maisie, so this may just have been a joke on the reader, but it's not clear what JEO considered 198 and 199 if not.

From around 1998 (when most of the strips were on their third iteration), they dropped any pretence and billed the repeats as "Cliff Hanger Classics", reprinting the strips in their original order and including trivia about the events of the week they were originally published in or behind-the-scenes information. They were not the only reprints in Buster at this stage (although it was the only story that expressly admitted it); in fact, with its budget at practically zero, nearly all of the comic was reprinted material by this point, with no more than a page or two of new content per issue (the amount of repeats had steadily increased since around 1993, and in early 1995 the comic switched from weekly to fortnightly to preserve the available material). Buster was the last survivor of Fleetway's many weekly humour titles, having absorbed all the others that hadn't already merged with other titles first -- its final merger was with Whizzer and Chips in 1990, which had previously merged with multiple Fleetway titles including Whoopee! in 1985, which itself had three comics (Wow!, Cheeky and Shiver and Shake) folded into it during its eleven-year run, and those final issues of Buster featured characters and material from all over the shop.

Another original-run strip, which is in no way here solely to balance out the text-to-picture ratio in this article a little better.

J. Edward Oliver was the very last artist still contributing new material to Buster as it neared the end, and was also responsible for compiling the letters page; he surely saw the writing on the wall, as in July 1999 -- just five months before Buster published its final issue, and also in the last edition to have a letters page -- he produced a new mini-strip where Cliff came across the Evil Spies trapped in quicksand, and all three options led to a happy ending: if Cliff left the Spies where they were, they'd never be able to trap him again, if he called the police they'd arrest the Spies and they'd never be able to trap him again, and if he decided to rescue them out of gratitude the Spies promised they'd never try to trap him again. This made Cliff a rare example of a character in a humour anthology comic with a clear beginning and end to their story.

(The Spies exclaimed they'd "been stuck in this quicksand for weeks"; a bit of meta-humour, as the reprints had finished a few months earlier. Something similar, if less definitive, had happened with the final regular strip in 1987; the correct option ended with Cliff reprogramming the giant robot the Evil Spies had set on him, and the last we see of them is them stating they'll have to give up trying to trap Cliff as the robot chases them down.

Incidentally, as you can see from that link, that last strip ran in the final issue of Buster before a major revamp which switched from newsprint to larger, glossy paper, with more pages in colour. It feels like the two things must be connected -- especially since in the first revamped issue Cliff is replaced by a new character from JEO who has no interactive element, Vid Kid -- but I'm not sure how.)

During the comic's final months Oliver also drew some strips which he probably wouldn't have risked if he hadn't known the comic's number was very nearly up, as well as the back page of the very final issue, where Cliff also makes one final cameo; his only other appearance after the one-off conclusion was a reprint of a Christmas "Save Santa" game in the penultimate edition. (I'd never noticed before looking at a higher-quality scan whilst writing this piece, but on that final page JEO twists several of his running motifs, with an arrow with another arrow pointing the same way within it, a mysterious box whose crank handle has fallen off, and a sign reading "Abolish Buster".)

It's actually because I have real trouble figuring out how to write satisfying conclusions to articles.

You can also go here to read another of my favourite twists on the strip's usual format (from its reprinted form in 1994, adapted so it could be used as the cover story).