Look-In #9/1979
Look-In #9/1979 sits at a culturally charged moment in the magazine's run: the Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman strips — both written by Angus Allan and running in the same weekly pages — were in their final months of individual publication, giving British children's comics one of the rarest things in the medium, parallel serialised adventures of two characters from the same fictional universe appearing side by side each week. The issue arrived just days after the Jon Pertwee Worzel Gummidge ITV series debuted on 25 February 1979, positioning Look-In as the primary comics home for the character at the precise moment of the show's cultural launch. As the sole comics vehicle licensed directly to ITV's own publishing arm, Look-In's 1979 run is the definitive British comics document of that transitional television season.
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By the time issue 9 was published, Look-In had been running since 9 January 1971, founded by Independent Television Publications as a children's companion to TV Times and subtitled 'The Junior TV Times.' The magazine had been under editor Colin Shelbourn since Alan Fennell's departure in 1975, with Angus Allan scripting the overwhelming majority of its comic strips throughout the decade. The 1979 volume was disrupted from its earliest issues by UK industrial action — a paper shortage forced issue 6 to be skipped, with a combined issue 6/7 appearing on 10 February — giving the 1979 run an unusual numbering history that affects how individual issues are identified.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Look-In renumbered its issues from #1 at the start of each calendar year, making '#9/1979' the ninth weekly issue of the 1979 volume, published in late February or early March 1979.
- The Six Million Dollar Man strip (Steve Austin, Oscar Goldman) was in its final story arc in the 1979 volume — 'The Nazi Flying Circus,' running across issues 1–13 of 1979 — written by Angus Allan with art by Martin Asbury; it ended with issue 13 (24 March 1979).
- The Bionic Woman strip (Jaime Sommers, Oscar Goldman) was also active at this point in 1979, written by Angus Allan and illustrated by John M. Burns and John Bolton, running through issue 13 of the 1979 volume (19 May 1979).
- The Jon Pertwee ITV television series Worzel Gummidge — produced by Southern Television — began broadcasting on 25 February 1979, the same week this issue would have appeared on newsstands.
- The Worzel Gummidge comic strip in Look-In is consistently dated by multiple sources to April 1979, drawn initially by Mike Noble; the strip's debut in the magazine therefore likely postdates issue 9/1979 by approximately five to six weeks.
- The Six Million Dollar Man was one of the longest-running action-adventure strips in Look-In's history, surpassed only by a handful of homegrown strips such as The Tomorrow People and Benny Hill.
- Look-In's 1979 run was disrupted by UK industrial action: paper shortages caused issue 6 to be skipped entirely, replaced by a combined issue 6/7 dated 10 February 1979, directly affecting the sequential numbering of all subsequent 1979 issues.
- The magazine was published by Independent Television Publications and subtitled 'The Junior TV Times,' functioning as the official ITV-licensed children's comic-magazine and carrying weekly regional ITV listings alongside its strips.