Another past-blast from this week in history: the twelfth issue of the legendary THE TITANS from 1976.
Legendary? Because it dared to be different! The (Manhattan-based) British Bullpen tried to give cash-strapped Brits more bang for their pence by flipping The Titans (and Super Spider-man) and placing two pages of art side-by-side on landscape pages.
For some reason (anyone got any ideas?), the previous issue and this one were "emergency issues" and appeared without their usual glossy covers (and with only 32 rather than the usual 36 pages). Marvel, bless 'em, at least softened the blow by reducing the cover price by a penny.
It the inefficient and strike-ridden Seventies there could have been any number of reasons for the sudden change but it's always struck me as odd that Marvel knew in advance that the problem was going to occur. Something of a "planned outage".
The time of year may have had something to do with it: maybe the need to pull production ahead of the Christmas break (an annual ritual I'm all too familiar with) may have meant there simply wasn't enough glossy paper and press time around to produce the normal issues.
We didn't have food banks in the "inefficient and strike-ridden Seventies" or the obscene wealth of a tiny minority shoved in our faces on a regular basis. In fact we were one of the richest countries in the world with a standard of living most people on this planet could only dream of.
ReplyDeleteHere, here, Col! The 70's AND 80's were brilliant times, compared to nowadays! Never in all my 60 -odd years have I lived through times where the people on benefits have to rely on charity just to survive, because of being bled dry by a government whose idea of a country recovering is the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor, sick and vulnerable!
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DeleteI don't know why they had the paper change but I do know that these were printed in pairs and then sliced down the middle. So issues 11 & 12 were always going to be on the same paper type.
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