1978: MERGER ALERT! 2000AD AND TORNADO

From August 1979: Merger Alert!  Tharg reluctantly welcomes the refugees from another defunct IPC weekly with the first combined issue of 2000AD AND TORNADO.  It is unlikely that anyone in King's Reach Tower, or indeed the nation at large, was celebrating.

The collapse of STARLORD, covered in a previous post, had been something of a shot-in-the-arm for 2000AD, shoving it out of a creative slump and introducing new strips that would become bedrocks of the title.  Not so much with the scruffy band of survivors from TORNADO.

I think the cover designer was taking the pee slightly by announcing 'at last' considering Tornado had only mustered the IPC-standard 22 issues before the accounts department despatched it.

And, did anyone call their comics 'papers'?  It's an IPC term (possibly also so used by their Dundee rivals... I didn't read many) that survived into the eighties.  But, as a buyer, I never used the term and I don't know anyone who did.  Not even my parents.  Newspapers were papers.  Magazines were magazines.  And comics were comics.  It has the whiff of an in-house term that they forgot no one in the real world used.

Not the nice rich colours on the cover as well.  That's not some fancy bit of digital clean-up, the IPC weeklies really did have better printing prior to the 1980s shift to newsprint.