1986: THE BEST OF MISTY MONTHLY Issue 1 (IPC)

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.