Your Top TV and Pop read returns! Yes, it's true. For the first time since the title closed its doors in 1994, LOOK-IN, the classic comic magazine of the '70s and '80s, is back. Published on 3 September 2007, the Prion book The Best of Look-in: The Seventies is the first licensed reprint collection of archive Look-in material. The 144-page large format hardback showcases lovingly-restored comic strips and features from the comic's 1970s heyday. Picture Strips include Black Beauty, Please Sir!, On the Buses, Catweazle, Potty Time, Man About the House, a six-part adventure for The Tomorrow People, Abba, Flintlock, a six-part Bionic Woman, Benny Hill and a three-part story for Sapphire and Steel (to those who emailed my site to say these strips would never be officially reprinted ... would you like some sauce with your hat?). These strips highlight art from comic masters such as Mike Noble, John Burns, Arthur Ranson, John Bolton, Harry North and Bill Titcombe. As the Junior TVTimes, it was also Look-in's job to promote ITV's latest hit programmes - features include fondly-remembered shows such as Magpie, Timeslip, Follyfoot, How, Pardon My Genie, Ace of Wands, Saturday Scene, TISWAS and Space:1999. There are also star pin-ups and interviews with '70s superstars including Roger Moore, Marc Bolan and Lena Zavaroni. Sport also features with archive articles on Geoff Hurst and Brian Moore's On the Ball column looking at the history of the England vs Scotland football fixture. Plus there are news items, competitions, readers letters and advertisements - all taking you back to the heady days of glam, glitter and New Wave. And don't miss a bonus cover gallery featuring 64 of the classic covers that helped make Look-in such a unique item on the newsagents' shelves. I had for some time been trying to gain contact details for rights holders IPC, wondering if they might republish some of the strip material in particular. Eventually I did track them down, where they explained that they would not publish material themselves but would licence it out to interested third parties. And such a third party turned out to be Carlton Books - after their massively successful Best of Jackie titles their Project Editor approached my old mate Graham Kibble-White to suggest further comic titles of yesteryear possibly worth reprinting and he made some coded enquiries to me about the size of my Look-in collection ... before we knew it, Carlton's Prion imprint had contracted Graham to edit a compilation collection, with the material sourced from my back copies (plus about three we paid through the nose for on ebay!), and pored over by Graham and myself in a weekend at my flat. Eventually it was agreed that I would scan and restore the material from my comics and also design the book. IPC were in the process of selling off the rather disorganised remnants of their original art archive to a private collector/dealer and so my back copies would almost become the Official Look-in Archive! Needless to say, to find myself designing the comic I had first discovered as a 6-year-old in 1977 was a dream come true. Some of the work on this book has been a labour of love on fairly tight timescales and I hope that comes through. Credit where it's due though and let me point out that the yellow cover shown top right was designed by Carlton's Lucy Coley. The alternate red cover above left IS by me though and this features on a budget imprint edition published under the SevenOaks name - this edition will be available in a variety of UK outlets, so look out for it! Both editions have a cover price of £12.99 but generous discounts will be available - clicking the yellow cover above will take you to the online store Amazon but do check out prices available at your favourite bookstores also. Come on, everyone ... sing along: "La-la-la-la-la LOOK-IN!" For more on how the book came together, read my article at Steve Holland's terrific comics blog site Bear Alley ANGUS P. ALLAN 1936-2007 14 September 2007. It's with genuine regret that I have to announce the very sad news that Look-in's chief strip writer Angus P. Allan died on 16 July 2007. He was admitted ill to hospital the previous Thursday and died on that Monday. A shock to all who knew him, it seems Angus was wholly unaware of the cancer that killed him. He died just six days short of his 71st birthday. The timing of this terrible news, for my own purely selfish reasons, was even more tragic. I was so proud of the Look-in book and had just a few days ago been arranging to have the publishers send a copy out to Angus at his farmhouse in France. It is very sad to know that he will now never see the book, a small, ovedue recognition of his sterling years of prolific output for the magazine for over 15 years. I had been delighted when Angus emailed me out of the blue in 2003 to congratulate me on my mini-site devoted to the Look-in strip Sapphire & Steel. Generously Angus offered to answer any questions I had about his time on the comic and we got together, swapping emails to produce the in-depth interview that appears on these pages. His dry wit and anecdotage brought to life the halcyon days of British comics in the 60s, 70s and 80s, a time when Angus "fuelled by the Auld McSpootery" would bang out page after page of exciting comic script (usually featuring guns, helicopters and giant ants). Always resolutely freelance after what sounded a frustrating stint in the offices at TV21, Angus seemed stifled by the bureaucracy of putting comics together and preferred to work on his own, with his only acknowledgement of business matters being occasional meetings with the likes of Colin Shelbourn or Arthur Ranson, held in his 'office' - a "local saloon" as he put it. After retiring from the contracting comics industry at the end of the 1980s, Angus and his wife Gillian (an ex-magazine editor herself and a former TV21/Lady Penelope staffer) retired to a farmhouse in the South of France. Most emails I received would end with a sign off that he was now going off to toil on the land for a while. Angus also played clarinet with a New Orleans-style jazz group The Rural Jazz Band and in fact he can be seen here on this YouTube video - he's the one in the Highlander's army cap! Angus and I last exchanged emails in the Spring when I was badgering him for details of some missing credits I couldn't quite pin down for the book and as ever he was a fount of remarkably clear information that he'd retained all these years. He was very much looking forward to seeing the book. Any mistakes and omissions in the book's credits are mine - Angus was never that great on artists as he met only a few of them and only a handful, like Arthur Ranson, were great buddies. Nonetheless it's nice to be able to at least have got some overdue recognition for these hardworking comic creators, albeit in small print. The saddest thing is that Angus's numerous credit lines are now published posthumously. As the man himself would always sign off: "Yours aye, mate". My sincere thanks to Wallace Poulter, a relative of Gillian Allan's, for passing on the sad news. "Wednesday 28 March 1979. I got Look-In this morning delivered. It's got the Bee Gees in it." Andrew Collins, Where Did It All Go Right? - Growing Up Normal in the 70s The 50s may have had The Eagle, the 60s TV21 but what the TV21 staff did next was pitched somewhere between comic strip action and the teen pop poster mags of the 80s like Smash Hits. Quality ephemera charts the times like few other documents and in the 70s and early 80s, Look-In: The Junior TV Times covered it all. Gloriously opportunistic, everyone from Donny Osmond and David Cassidy to Debbie Harry and Diana Spencer, every hit ITV show from Man About The House to The Man From Atlantis was in there at some point. I bought Look-In between 1977 and 1983 on and off and since then have added to what I managed to keep - I've now well over 500 issues in my collection. These have formed the basis of the Prion reprint collection. This tribute mini-site presents two exclusive interviews - one with Colin Shelbourn, the comic's first designer and then Editor between 1975-1992, and one with chief comic strip writer Angus Allan. There's also a full guide to the Sapphire & Steel comic strip of 1979-81. To return to this index page at any point, click the logos top right of each interview page. Site Info/Credits If you are a publisher, DVD label or perhaps archive programme-maker who is thinking of using classic Look-in material then do contact me via email. I do not own the rights to the material but as rights holders IPC hold no archive, my collection of nearly 500 issues from 1971-1985, is probably one of the best in the country. I can provide quality, restored scans of back issue material to media professionals, either for high-end printing or as jpegs suitable for DVD/TV transmission. This is not to supersede the rights of IPC and it would be up to you to arrange licensing. You can also contact me with feedback on the book - I will pass on any relevant comments to Carlton, so if you have suggestions for future collections you might like to see, email me at: amcgown AT animus-web DOT demon DOT co DOT uk (sorry not to use a direct link there but I get so much spam thanks to my websites)