Pocket-Money Comics: Look-In

Look-In
Publisher: ITP / IPC
First issue: 9 Jan 1971
Last issue: 12 March 1994
Issues: 1210

In print for EXACTLY two decades, two years, two months and two days — and another day, and another year — Look-In was a hybrid of magazine and comic, quite unusual for its time, though not entirely unique.

The premise of Look-In, as mentioned on the cover of every issue for the first nineteen years or so of its existence, is that it was a junior version of the TV Times, the British weekly magazine that covered the ITV channels. The BBC channels were catered for by the Radio Times: until March 1991 television schedules were tightly controlled and it was illegal for anyone other than the controlling companies to publish listings in advance. (This is not a joke: after the listings were deregulated not only did the TV Times and the Radio Times start printing the schedules for all the channels, but a whole bunch of new independent TV listings magazines popped up.)

Look-In‘s comic-strip content generally consisted of a couple of one- or two-page humour strips based around popular comedians or sit-coms, two or three two-page strips based on adventure shows, and sometimes a biographical strip about a pop-star or a band.

Over the years, the TV-based strips included a very diverse list, among which were (deep breath) The A-Team, Airwolf, Alf, Alias the Jester, Battlestar Galactica (as I recall, the airing of the TV show was delayed in the UK, meaning we got the Look-In adaptation long before we actually saw the show), Benny Hill, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventures, The Bionic Woman, Black Beauty, Bless This House, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (I loved this one, mostly because I had a crush on Erin Gray), Cannon and Ball, Catweazle, Charlie’s Angels, CHiPs, Count Duckula, Danger Mouse, Dick Turpin, Doctor at Large (and a bunch of its sequel series), Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, Elephant Boy, The Fall Guy, The Famous Five, Follyfoot, The Further Adventures of Oliver Twist, Galaxy High School, Garfield, How the West Was Won, Inspector Gadget, Just William, Knight Rider, Kung Fu, Logan’s Run, Magnum, P.I., Man About the House, Man from Atlantis (these last two are not connected, sadly), Michael Bentine’s Potty Time, Mind Your Language, Mork & Mindy, No. 73, On the Buses, Pathfinders, Please Sir!, Robin of Sherwood, Sapphire & Steel, Scooby-Doo, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Smurfs, Space: 1999, Star Fleet, Street Hawk, Super Gran, Terrahawks, Timeslip, The Tomorrow People, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Worzel Gummidge.

To the best of my knowledge, almost all of these strips were home-grown, produced specially for Look-In. Unfortunately, because of the complicated ownership rights, the chance of seeing proper reprints of these strips is very low.

The list of pop-star/band biographical strips covered includes 5 Star, A-ha, Abba, The Beatles, Bros, Bucks Fizz, David Cassidy, Jason Donovan, Flintlock, Haircut One Hundred, Madness, Kylie Minogue and Elvis Presley. The lack of respect shown to Sigue Sigue Sputnik here is shocking, I tell you.

Backing up the strips were features on TV shows, movies, sport, music, etc. Just about anything that might be of interest to readers… with the sometimes painfully notable omission of any TV shows broadcast by the BBC. No comic-strips based on Doctor Who or Are You Being Served? or Grange Hill or Blake’s 7 here, my friends. But that aside, you certainly got a lot for your money with Look-In.

Today we’re looking at issue #34, volume 8, cover-dated August 19th 1978 (the issue numbers were reset at the start of every year, and the volume number appropriately incremented). This was around the era when I flicked through every issue just in case it had a mention of Star Wars — because, well, Star Wars — and if it did, and I had the spare cash, I bought it.

That’s Elvis Presley on the cover, looking oddly more like Nick Kamen than himself (Kamen would have been only about sixteen at the time), apparently conjoined with someone who I think is meant to be Lee Majors, but to my eyes he actually bears a stronger resemblance to Melvin Bragg. That’s unusual, because the artist is Arnaldo Putzo (credited at the bottom of page 3) and normally his cover-paintings are spot-on.

In fact, Putzo’s covers were one of Look-In‘s greatest features, in my opinion. Photos on a magazine cover weren’t anything special, but a painting of your favourite character or pop-star? Yes please! The cover-paintings first showed up in October 1971 and initially they were closer to caricatures, with oversized heads and exaggerated expressions, but they eventually settled down to more realistic depictions. On the right, the cover for the 25 January 1975 issue, also depicting Lee Majors: if you’re a nearly-nine-year-old fan of The Six Million Dollar Man, as I was then, that cover is awesome! (Lee Majors showed up a lot in Look-In: if you weren’t around in the mid-to-late 1970s you just can’t comprehend how popular The Six Million Dollar Man was. It was huge.)

Look-In‘s cover paintings were dropped after ten years, in September 1981, and were replaced with photos which were pretty boring in comparison but probably a lot cheaper to produce. As far as I can tell, the final painted-cover issue of that era was this one…

… which I’m sure you can guess ticks a lot of boxes for me.

But back to our sample issue from 1978. The 10p cover-price is about average for a comic at the time: published in that same week, Mandy #605 cost 7p, Victor & Wizard #913 was 7p, Buster & Monster Fun cost 8p, 2000AD #78 cost 9p, Starlord #15 was 12p.

The mag’s thirty-two pages contain six comic-strips, three full-page ads, and the rest is taken up by editorial stuff and features. But as we’ll soon see, some of those features are actually ads in disguise.

So let’s look at the issue in detail, shall we?

1. Front cover, as discussed above

2. Ad for Bubbly bubble-gum.
I don’t remember this gum specifically, but I remember the type. Big, soft, pungent, wrapped in waxed paper and if you left one in your pocket for too long the wax would melt and the gum would adhere to the paper and probably your pocket, too. Luckily, if you’re of an age where the idea of this sort of gum doesn’t turn your stomach, you’ll probably not be bothered about consuming considerable quantities of pocket-lint along with it.

3. The Benny Hill Page
Comic-strip, 1 page
A regular feature for a very long time, each strip depicted the mishaps of one of Benny’s ancestors or relatives. It was harmless stuff, mostly, that pretty much bypassed the TV show’s inherent casual sexism and crudity.

The art here by Bill Titcombe is simple and clear, but well-executed and very expressive, but the story hasn’t aged tremendously well… not because of the aforementioned sexism or crudity, though… Benny’s cousin Lou’s girlfriend (the daughter of his landlady) wants a crocodile handbag and he can’t afford it: it costs fifty pounds, which back in 1978 was more money than existed in the entire world, so he buys a stuffed alligator for only a quid with the intention of carving it up into a handbag and a pair of shoes. You just wouldn’t get a “crocodile handbag” story element these days.

Lou realises the alligator’s skin is a bit tough, so he leaves it soaking in the bath in order to soften it up… and naturally the landlady walks in on it and reacts badly. A silly tale, but cute enough.

4-5. Stewpot’s Newsdesk
Editorial and news, 2 pages
Look-In‘s pretend editor was Ed Stewart, affectionately known as “Stewpot,” a well-known and much-liked DJ of the era. News in this issue consists of a veiled ad for a Mickey Mouse watch, a list of pen-pals, some sports thing, and two articles more likely to be of interest to us… First, reader Annette Bugler of Leicester thinks that Denis Healey resembles the Incredible Hulk, and second is a look at some fanzines sent in by readers: Angel! by Jaymal Odedra of Balham, London; and Speedy and Bionic, by Jason Cressey of Doncaster. Jaymal and Jason: if you’re reading this because you’ve searched for your own name on Google and stumbled across Rusty Staples, then Hello there! Get in touch and tell me all about your fanzines!

6-7. Swimming for Gold!
Feature, 2 pages, one in colour
All about Sharron Davis, a swimmer. This is sports so… meh.

8-9. The Six Million Dollar Man
Comic-strip, 2 pages, colour
A new adventure featuring the world’s most famous cyborg — almost-fatally-injured former astronaut Steve Austin — begins in this issue, with art by Martin Asbury and a script (probably) by Angus P. Allan. The art is sketchy and seems a little rushed, but I reckon that’s deliberate — it certainly adds to the dynamism. Most of the drawings of Steve are not recognisable, but on the second page there’s a very good likeness of his boss, Oscar Goldman, which I’ve reproduced here on the right.

The story opens with Steve interrupting a shady transaction between a jewel thief and his buyer in a motel room. Steve beats them up, takes the jewels and the money, then scarpers at the double. These are not the actions of a proper agent of the OSI (which, depending on the episodes of the TV show you’ve seen, stands for “Office of Scientific Intelligence,” “Office of Scientific Investigation” or “Office of Strategic Intelligence” — when we were kids, we figured it stood for “Oscar & Steve’s Investigations” which is way better than any of the official names) but a handy flashback shows us that Steve is planning to go undercover to bust a much larger gem-smuggling operation in Hong Kong. The story ends with a brief cut to a Hong Kong customs officer getting knifed in the back by a henchman of someone with the appropriately scary name of Mister Laughter. It’s an intriguing start, but two pages just isn’t quite enough to get the story flowing.

10. Stewpot’s Starchart
Puzzle, ½ page

10. Walnut Cookies
Recipe, ½ page

11. 100 Rotadraw Superheroes to be Won!
Competition, 1 page
I had completely forgotten about Rotadraw until I turned the page and saw this ad — I mean, competition — and then it all came thundering back… It was a system of plastic discs each containing a series of carefully-placed holes and slots and if you put it on a sheet of paper, and poked your ball-point pen through the holes and slots in the correct order, you somehow ended up with lines on you page that in theory made a picture — the Retro Gamer Emporium channel on YouTube has a demo of how it worked. The ads on TV made it look amazing, but the reality was usually closer to the drawing of Superman we see in the competition, which entrants were supposed to colour and send away. I’ve included it here just in case you find yourself in need of a nightmare:

12. Enid Blyton’s Famous Five
Comic-strip, 2 pages
Ah, we all loved the Famous Five TV show when we were kids, and I suspect that for a quite a lot of you readers the theme song is running through your head right now — as it will be for the rest of the day. I also know that a healthy number of readers are picturing the kids enthusing about a picnic with “heaps of lettuce, bags of tomatoes and lashings of ginger beer!” — but I’m pretty sure that originated in the brilliant Comic Strip Presents parody than the actual Famous Five show.

The episode in this issue is from an adventure already in progress, but the recap sums things up nicely: the kids are staying in a remote cottage so they can be company for a strange lonely kid called Wilfred whose aunt is away for unspecified reasons. Wilfred has a magic flute or pan-pipes or something that can charm animals and also there’s a mysterious island called “Keep-Away Island” nearby that possibly contains “gold and treasure.”

When Wilfred realises he’s lost his magic whistle he goes off to look for it and the Famous Five decide not to help him but to instead hire a boat and go rowing. The unexpectedly strong current carries them out to the mysterious island where they’re not supposed to be. So they go exploring… but unbeknownst to them, the tide has come in and carried their boat away. The end — for now!

It’s adapted from the book Five Have a Mystery to Solve, the title of which presumably hails from Ms Blyton’s “Fer cryin’ out loud, how many more of these blasted things do I have to write?” era.

The art, by the great and much-missed Mike Noble (a veteran of TV comic-strip adaptations such as Fireball XL5, Captain Scarlet, Space: 1999 and many more), is typically gorgeous stuff, with clean lines and a great sense of weight and solidity to the characters. The characters might not resemble the actors from the TV show very closely, but that doesn’t matter: they’re distinctive, expressive and credible.

14-19. Long Live Elvis!
Feature, 5½ pages, two in colour
Elvis Presley died on August 16th, 1977, so to mark his first anniversary this issue of Look-In features a retrospective by Angus P. Allan. It’s a good piece, informative without being too mawkish, and it’s accompanied by a colour centre-spread pin-up that I’m sure adorned many bedroom walls. The article is followed by a competition to win an Elvis LP… I expect that was very popular indeed — a rare chance to obtain a compilation of Elvis songs! I don’t think there’s been many of those.

20-21. Logan’s Run
Comic-strip, 2 pages
I remember really liking the TV show on which this was based, even though I knew that its connection to the original novel was pretty thin: the show is loosely based on the movie adaptation of the book, which had already taken quite a few liberties with the story and settings.

The basic premise remains intact from the book by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson: in a post-apocalyptic Earth, survivors live in comparative luxury in a domed city, but upon reaching a certain age they’re killed in order to preserve resources. In order to ensure that all citizens comply, “Sandmen” are authorised to hunt down and terminate any “runners.” (In the movie and TV show, one of the main differences is that the age of termination is thirty: in the book, it’s twenty-one. The movie and TV show also added the concept of reincarnation to encourage the citizens to see their “Lastday” as a positive thing.) The protagonist is Logan 5 (Logan 3 in the book), a Sandman who turns on his own people and becomes a runner.

In this strip, Logan, Jessica (the woman with whom Logan falls in love) and Rem (an android) are trapped in a hidden valley by their perennial pursuer, Francis, a former colleague of Logan’s. Their vehicle has crashed and Logan’s been killed. As Francis and his men arrest Jessica and Rem, the latter spots that Logan is actually alive after all. He fakes having a robo-heart-attack in order to distract the Sandmen, then Logan strikes and saves the day! Well, no he doesn’t. What really happens is that Logan runs down a hillside and the Sandmen see him. With them now double-distracted, Rem beats up the Sandmen and Logan takes their guns and the credit. But as the end of the second page approaches, so does an ominous dust-cloud signalling the arrival of back-up Sandmen! (It’s not clearly specified in the strip, but I think we’re supposed to surmise that the dust-cloud is being kicked up by the Sandmen’s vehicle, and not that the dust is going to coalesce into Sandmen, which would be rather cool.)

The art, by Arthur Ranson, is particularly nice in this strip… mostly. Ranson’s second-to-none with photo-referenced faces and figures, but a couple of the panels are very dodgy indeed.

22. Gerry Anderson’s Starcruiser
Ad disguised as a comic-strip, ½ page
Starcruiser was a proposed series by Anderson that was never made, but the concept ended up as a series of toys and model kits. The strip here is a pseudo-factual piece about “Rescue Globes,” or life-rafts for spaceships.

22. All Things Nice for Sugar and Spice
Ad disguised as a feature, ½ page
Short article about seals in Windsor Safari Park that’s really an ad to join Wildlife World.

23. Lee Majors… The Viking
Feature, 1 page
Told you they really loved Lee Majors in Look-In! Here’s an article about his then-upcoming Viking movie The Norseman. The film was not well received by the critics, but, on the same hand, it wasn’t well received by the public either. I’ve never seen the movie, but here’s a still from the article…

… so now I have to see it! It’s like Zorro going to a costume party as a Roman superhero! What’s not to love about that!?

24-25. The Bionic Woman
Comic-strip, 2 pages, colour
In case you’re not in the know, The Bionic Woman began in The Six Million Dollar Man… In the two-part episode “The Bionic Woman,” Jaime Sommers is introduced as former astronaut Steve Austin’s former girlfriend. They’re reunited shortly before Jaime almost dies in a parachuting accident, and Steve pleads with his boss to repair her with bionic parts. This is done, reluctantly, and all is well right up to the bit where she dies. But the character was very popular so her death was retconned and next season the bionic woman returned for another two-parter, “The Return of the Bionic Woman.” This too was very successful, so she was given her own very successful series.

In this episode — magnificently drawn by John Bolton — Jaime is undercover as a stunt-person on a film set in order to flush out a possible enemy spy. On the set, a fellow agent has been attacked by a horse that’s just gone absolutely wild, so Jaime leaps into action and uses her bionic strength to bring the horse under control. Unfortunately, her colleague dies from his wounds: the first and only death in this whole comic! (Well, not counting Elvis.) Jaime discovers that the horse had been poisoned with a drugged dart… as she sits in her trailer pondering the mystery, someone sinister is setting light to a molotov cocktail under the trailer.

This is my favourite strip of the lot, and not just because of the artwork — it comes a lot closer than any of the others to capturing the feel of the TV show.

26. Down on Corgi Farm
Ad, 1 page
An ad for Corgi farmyard toys. Not my sort of thing by any means, but it’s drawn by Frank Langford so that’s never bad!

27. Screen Quiz
Quiz, 1 page
Fourteen questions that were probably reasonably easy back in the day, but forty-two years on they’re a lot trickier… I was able to fully answer five and partly answer two.

28-29. Doctor on the Go
Comic-strip, 2 pages
I never watched any of the Doctor… series (apparently there have been seven different series between 1969’s Doctor in the House and 1991’s Doctor at the Top) so this strip didn’t really ring any nostalgia bells with me. I don’t know the characters at all, but a wild stab in the dark with a delicately-wielded number ten blade tells me that they’re in the medical profession.

In this episode, it’s night-time and they’re in a dinghy rowing out to a boat that a rich patient has told them they can borrow for a holiday. But they accidentally get on the wrong boat, and then accidentally start it up, and the owner of said boat — a ne’er-do-well criminal boss who’s been smuggling a million quid’s worth of gems — thinks it’s being hijacked and orders his henchmen to go after them and kill them. Cue the cliff-hanger… That’s a pretty bleak ending for a strip based on a sit-com.

The art in this strip is by Bill Titcombe again, who drew The Benny Hill Page up at the top there: cartoony, but very nice all the same, showcasing Titcombe’s exceptional skills at capturing an actor’s likeness in cartoon form without resorting to caricature!

31-31. TV Listings
Feature, 1½ pages
I’d forgotten this, but I used to hate this part of Look-In, in which all of the kid-friendly TV shows for the coming week are listed, divided into the appropriate ITV regions. And the reason I hated it was because at the time here in Dublin we could only receive HTV, the Welsh channel. Nothing wrong with Wales, of course — among the friendliest and finest people in the world, the Welsh — but it always felt like the other regions got better shows.

31. Next Week’s Issue
Ad, ½ page
Next week’s issue has the Famous Five on the cover (you’re still humming that theme tune, aren’t you?), and promises features on Boney M, some sports stuff, and upcoming movies International Velvet and Convoy.

32. Super Hero Wallbusters
Ad, 1 page, colour
Ah, now we’re talking! Posters for Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and Robin, Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk. You’ll notice that these are the exact same superheroes we saw earlier on the final painted-cover issue of Look-In, except for Robin, but he doesn’t count. I’m including the complete Super Hero Wallbusters ad here so I don’t have to describe it (and because it’s now 02:30 and I’m very tired indeed)…

I want them! But at £1.60 each (or only £8.00 for all five), that was a lot of money in 1978. Enough to buy eighty copies of Look-In, which would certainly yield enough awesome covers and pin-ups to easily cover the wall-space that otherwise would have been taken up by these posters. (Still want them, though.)

Overall verdict time…

Look-In was a quality publication and good value for money, but — a few strips aside — it wasn’t really for me. I didn’t care about music or sports, or any movies that didn’t feature aliens or monsters, and the strips were just too short to build up any momentum.

As I said as the start, Look-In was unusual but it wasn’t entirely unique. The BBC tried something similar with their magazine Beeb (29 Jan to 11 Jun 1985, 20 issues), and again a few years later they published Fast Forward to greater success (1 Nov 1989 to 29 Aug 1995, for about 305 issues).

I’m never likely to read the following issues of Look-In, so the cliffs in this issue will remain forever hanging for me. I don’t mind… I’ve already decided that the evil gem-smuggler in the Doctor on the Go strip turns out to be Mister Laughter, the evil gem-smuggler from The Six Million Dollar Man. The doctors’ inadvertently stolen boat will end up at Famous Five‘s island, which they’ll discover is actually not haunted or anything; the owners just want to keep the public away because there’s a movie being made, where — on the run from his irate landlady — Benny Hill’s cousin Lou arrives just in time to warn Jaime Sommers about the molotov cocktail hidden under her trailer: he bats it away with his stuffed alligator and it destroys vehicle carrying the back-up Sandmen, allowing Logan, Jessica and Rem to resume running.

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Bonus: See how much you remember of 1978… Here’s the Screen Quiz from this issue of Look-In!

I’ve helpfully blurred out the answers so you can’t cheat — not that you would, anyway. I know I can trust you! When you’re ready, scroll down to see the answers.

Question 12 is going to be particularly tricky unless you’re a die-hard fan: with something like fifteen members of the band to date Status Quo’s name was particularly ironic.

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