THE BEST OF MISTY was another entry into IPC's range of back-catalogue scouring "Best of" black & white monthlies and launched in early 1986. Like the others in the series, it compiled stories from the weekly.
Unusually, these compilations hailed from a long-defunct title. IPC had folded the cult classic supernatural girls comic into TAMMY (ahem) way back in January 1980 after a run of 101 issues over just under two years.
The "Best Of" line was somewhat hit-and-miss in terms of success. The 2000AD spin-off, launched the previous year, was a runaway success (despite the sheer number of other 2000AD reprints doing the rounds at the time) and eventually ran for a decade before being relaunched to coincide with the 1995 JUDGE DREDD movie. It even managed to spawn a spin-off of its own when the Dredd strips were split off into their own title.
At the other end of the spectrum, the EAGLE spin-off proved to be a flop desperate being attached to IPC's 1980s mainstay (the list of other titles it absorbed is depressingly long: SCREAM, TIGER, BATTLE, MASK and WILDCAT), and pulling reprints from TIGER and SCREAM, it failed to find a readership.
These represented a low investment/ high return prospect for the publisher… they didn't have to pay to reprint their own inventory and the work-for-hire creators weren't entitled to supplementary payments for reuse of material.
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