Last year, I published one of my favourite things I've ever written -- a history of Cliff Hanger, the part-gamebook part-comic strip that ran in Fleetway Publications' Buster from 1983-87, and was then reprinted from 1992 until near the comic's end in 1999. Here's a thing that's been bothering me about the strip for a while. Or possibly two things, one of which isn't bothering me any more.
One of the many interesting quirks of Cliff is that almost every single strip is numbered in a unique way: which number strip it is appears on Cliff's jacket. (Or occasionally somewhere else if artist J. Edward Oliver can't put it there for some reason.)
The number in the final regular strip in 1987 was 197. (Thanks to Great News for All Readers for the scan of the original strip, rather than the colourised reprint.)
The rules surrounding this numbering system seem pretty clear: Only the 'regular' strips in the weekly comic count. Cliff's jacket appears unnumbered in Christmas annuals or Summer Specials, or other nonstandard strips such as the Cliff Hanger Adventure Book, a cut-out-and-keep Choose Your Own Adventure story which appeared over five issues of Buster.
Amongst the reprints, in the issue of Buster dated 8th July 1997 the following Cliff strip appeared (this scan from the Internet Archive upload):
An all-new one, albeit with Crazy Maisie pulling a takeover early on, with the number on Cliff's jacket a nice, round 200. But what did J. Edward Oliver consider 198 and 199?
(A brief history of Crazy Maisie might be a good idea here. Maisie started off as a villain in another JEO strip, the part-superhero story part-puzzle page Master Mind in 1982, but started appearing again in the mid-to-late 90s, at the point where it was probably clear the comic was on its way out, to baffle readers with her own brand of surreal humour and nonsensical puzzles. This started off as invading other characters' strips, but near the end she even got her own strip on occasion.
There are other Cliff strips after this one, in the 31/03/98 and 14/04/98 issues, that also feature Maisie, but are in fact repurposed Master Mind strips with new art replacing him with Cliff; JEO evidently did not consider these 'proper' Cliff strips, as his jacket is unnumbered in them, even though the latter strip contains a newly-drawn set of outcomes as Cliff decides how to get Maisie off his page.)
The majority of the last decade of Buster is on the Internet Archive, and I've been able to track down most of the editions it's missing. However, there are two issues prior to this one where I haven't been able to ascertain which edition of Cliff Hanger they contained: the issues dated 9 June 1995 and 8 December 1995. If 198 and 199 ran, and the number 200 wasn't just JEO playing a practical joke on observant readers, then... those issues containing them would be by far the most obvious and simple explanation. The June edition was part of Buster's 35th anniversary celebrations (containing the first part of a special pull-out supplement on the comic's history), and the December one was quite close to Christmas at a point where they'd already reprinted all the festive Cliff strips, so it's certainly possible JEO decided to draw some new material for those occasions.1
I also don't have the issues dated 16 February 1996, 15 March 1996, 12 April 1996, 25 June 1996, 18 February 1997, 4 March 1997 and 13 May 1997; however, at those points serialised Cliff stories which ran over several issues were being reprinted and we can tell which strips must have been in those issues from the ones we do have. The quite remarkable fansite bustercomic.com indicates that no Cliff strips ever appeared between the end of his regular series ending in 1987 and the reprints starting in the issue dated 9 May 1992.
Another thing, though. This is the Cliff strip that ran two issues after #200, in the edition of Buster dated 5 August 1997 (it was on a fortnightly schedule by this time):
If you look at the last row of panels, you can see the number '97' next to J. Edward Oliver's signature in the margins. I was leaning towards the explanation that this was a reprint of strip number #97, and the number goes there because there's nowhere else in the strip to put it, since I could find no other case of JEO including the year of publication in any of his strips.
But the numbering convention of Cliff means it's easy enough to work out when strip #97 must have originally ran (in fact in the 25th anniversary edition of Buster, dated 25/05/85), and someone who knows even more about comics than I do, Ben Baker, came through for me:
So it looks like the pitch-black strip is in fact an unheralded new strip, and would presumably be #201 if JEO had had anywhere to put the number.
There are a few other loose ends regarding some issues I don't have, or where I do have the issue but can't figure out the source of the Cliff strip, and particularly in light of the above it'd be nice to tie them off:
- The 20 May 1994 strip was a two-page one that appeared on the front cover, numbered #169, but bustercomic.com indicates that when #169 originally ran (by my calculations, 11 October 1986) it only had one page, indicating some material may have been added for the rerun; JEO almost certainly did not consider this to count as a 'new' strip, based on other examples, but it'd be interesting to see the original anyway
- The 25 November 1994 issue has a strip which strongly looks like a reprint from a Summer Special, but I don't know which one (the 16/09/94 edition was a reprint from the 1986 Summer Special, so material from them was definitely used as the well of material from the weekly comic started to run dry)
- The strip in the 30 September 1997 issue also looks like it came from a Summer Special
- The 28 October 1997 issue has a "Mad Monsters" board game which may have come from either a Summer Special or a Christmas annual (this wasn't necessarily always a Cliff strip -- it may have been Master Mind, or something else entirely, and the Cliff bits retrofitted for the reprint)
- I don't know which strip was in the 9 December 1997 issue
- bustercomic.com lists the 23 December 1997 strip as "Escape from Christmas Castle", which I'm guessing was a reprint of a board game from a Christmas annual, but seeing it would be nice
- The 6 January 1998 issue has a Choose Your Own Adventure story that is almost certainly a reprint from an annual, but I'm not sure which one
And one other oddity is the 27 May 1997 edition:
Notice how the number on Cliff's jacket jumps from 144, to 147, to 149, to 151 over the course of the page? At this point, Buster was reprinting the serialised stories which ran over several weeks, which all appeared consecutively from #105 to #152, with the end of each story leading directly into the start of the next.
Strip numbers |
Story title |
Original run |
Rerun |
#105 to #110 |
Untitled |
20 July to 24 August 1985 |
22 July to 26 August 1994 |
#111 to #120 |
“Star Warts” |
31 August to 2 November 1985 |
16 February to 25 June 1996 |
#121 to #130 |
“A View to a Spill” |
9 November 1985 to 11 January 1986 |
9 July to 12 November 1996 |
#131 to #137 |
“The Pride of Frankenswine” |
18 January to 1 March 1986 |
26 November 1996 to 18 February 1997 |
#138 to #143 |
“Cliff Hanger Versus the Transmuters” |
8 March to 12 April 1986 |
4 March to 13 May 1997 |
#144 to #150 |
“Forward to the Past” |
19 April to 31 May 1986 |
18 July to 29 August 1992 |
#151 to #152 |
“Return of the Evil Spies” |
7 to 14 June 1986 |
Part 1 reprinted 5 September 1992; as it works fine as a standalone, Part 2 was not in the following issue. Both parts rerun 27 May to 10 June 1997… kind of. (See below) |
As you can see from this table, they reran "Forward to the Past" in 1992 (with one or two speech bubbles redone in the first and last strips to avoid non sequiturs relating to the previous and next stories), well before any of the other serialised stories. This meant it was skipped over when they reran the other serials sequentially in 1996-97, and the above strip is essentially #151 but with the first half redone with panels from various episodes of "Forward to the Past" and new dialogue to bridge the gap. I would say it's more or less totally inconceivable that JEO considered this to count as #198 or #199.
But if you have either of those 1995 issues, or know anything more about those or any other loose ends, you could do me a big favour here.
1. The 22 December 1995 issue contains a Cliff strip which originally ran in June 1984, and was obviously not Christmas-themed when it first appeared. However, it is based around Cliff being forced to participate in the act of "Marvo, the Mad Magician" at the Evil Spies' party, and seems to have been rather cleverly tweaked to work as a Christmas strip, with snow added to the exterior shots in the first two panels and the dialogue in one panel changed to refer to "a Christmas show". ↩
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