Look-In #5/1975
Look-In was the definitive British comic-magazine hybrid for ITV-watching children, and its eventual adoption of the Six Million Dollar Man strip — when it launched in issue #26 of 1975 — gave Steve Austin his first serialised British comic incarnation at the very peak of the character's mid-1970s cultural moment. The strip became one of the longest-running adventure serials in Look-In's entire 23-year history, running continuously from June 1975 through March 1979 and giving a generation of UK children weekly bionic adventures months before American publishers had fully caught up. As part of the wider Look-In lineage, it also demonstrated that a US television property could sustain years of original, all-new comics storytelling entirely separate from its source episodes — a model that influenced how British magazines licensed American TV hits for the remainder of the decade.
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Look-In was launched on 9 January 1971 by Independent Television Publications Ltd — the same company behind the TV Times — under founding editor Alan Fennell, a veteran of TV Century 21. Fennell departed in 1975 and art editor Colin Shelbourn took over, steering the magazine through its creative peak. Strip writing was handled largely by Angus Allan throughout this era. The Six Million Dollar Man strip began on 21 June 1975, replacing the outgoing Kung Fu serial, and was created and maintained for its entire run by the consistent team of writer Angus P. Allan and artist Martin Asbury — an unusually stable creative pairing for any weekly anthology comic.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Look-In was a weekly British children's magazine subtitled 'Junior TV Times,' published by Independent Television Publications Ltd from 9 January 1971 to 12 March 1994, built around ITV programming.
- The Six Million Dollar Man comic strip debuted in Look-In with issue #26, dated 21 June 1975, replacing the Kung Fu strip — not in issue #5 of 1975.
- Every instalment of the Six Million Dollar Man strip across its entire Look-In run was written by Angus P. Allan and drawn by Martin Asbury, making it one of the most creatively consistent long-running strips in the magazine.
- The strip ran from issue #26/1975 to issue #13/1979 (24 March 1979), spanning nearly four years and accumulating close to 200 instalments — making it one of Look-In's longest-running adventure strips.
- The Six Million Dollar Man enjoyed colour page treatment for the bulk of its Look-In run, a distinction reserved for the magazine's more prominent strips.
- The very first Look-In Six Million Dollar Man strip (21 June 1975) contained a rare licensed-product reference to the OSO (Office of Scientific Operations), the organisation name used in the original TV pilot rather than the better-known OSI of the regular series.
- Steve Austin's Look-In run was followed immediately by a further six-month crossover strip called Bionic Action, in which he appeared alongside Jaime Sommers after The Bionic Woman strip ended in May 1979.
- The Six Million Dollar Man television series itself, on which the strip was based, ran on ABC from 1974–1978 and starred Lee Majors as the bionic Colonel Steve Austin, originally adapted from Martin Caidin's 1972 novel Cyborg.