1979: LAST ISSUE ALERT! TORNADO CRASHES.

From 1979: Last Issue Alert!  After only 22 issues, IPC's TORNADO ran out of luck and announced its impending merger with 2000AD.

I posted the first merged issue the other day but this is the last of the vanquished, complete with the customary 'great news chums' cover splash... an announcement that meant either an impending freebie (this was the time when announcing an announcement was almost as big as whatever was being announced... sometimes bigger if it was just going to be a Heinz badge taped to the following week's cover) or the axeman cometh.  

It's interesting that the merger page goes big on the 2000AD characters and only mentions Tornado's lucky survivors as an afterthought.  Maybe no one thinks they are a strong selling point!  I'd have also changed how I presented the logo so that - in the advert at least - Tornado didn't look like such an afterthought.

On your marks... Get set... Stop!

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.