When the comic started it was TV Times-style photographic covers - why the change to artwork covers by around no.40 of the first year?
Practicality, really. The early covers could be quite static … not all of them, some were actors in costume striking a pose in a scene and those were sort of quite exciting to look at. More often the photographic covers would be fairly still - they were just simply a famous face, which if you think about it was what a TV Times cover was. Now we were quite pleased with these because we thought it gave a children's magazine a more adult and sophisticated feel but what actually happened was that we weren't really appealing to kids because they were sort of boring really. Therefore the move was to covers that were more active and exciting - for as long as we could achieve those photographically that's great, but actually it was impossible to find that kind of imagery week-in-week out photographically. So we set about finding illustrators who could do action-type pictures which was going back more to Alan and Geoff's comic heritage - it was almost as if the cover picture was a single frame from the comic strip.
One early cover shot, fairly atypically, was a photo of a lizard (no.9) which looked like a Sunday Times supplement!
It's funny how your mind slips back thirty years or whatever it is - but that lizard one was a cause celebre because there was some real championing of the lizard for the cover. A faction that said this is a wonderful cover - isn’t it great that a children's magazine can have a picture of a lizard on it? And there was another faction saying what the hell are you playing at, that's ludicrous, why would you put a lizard on the cover? I think it must have sold poorly or there was feedback from somewhere or other that really hit home that no way should there be a lizard on the cover again!
So the die was cast for illustrated
covers.
The irony of the artwork covers is that they weren't
Arnaldo Putzu's straight away but he's the one people
associate with them. We went through a short period
with people like Angus McBride doing them. I realised
that if we were going to have these action covers we'd
need a roster of artists who were really good at doing
action images from TV stills so the thought process
led me to someone who would do film posters. So on one
hand we had illustrators from comic strip like Angus
and then were on the lookout for someone working in
film posters. So I saw Arnaldo Putzu's work and thought
how fantastic it would be if he could work for us and
eventually we got in touch with him. He worked in an
agency studio doing movie posters. He was their in-house
artist, in an office in Margaret Street up behind Oxford
Circus so actually quite physically close to Look-In's
offices at the time on Tottenham Court Road.
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He did a
couple of sample goes at it and it quickly became obvious
that he was fantastic. It must have been quite a treadmill
for him - he did one a week. He was always quite cagey
about how long it took because I guess he didn't want
me to realise how quick it was. Even so I would think
they took a couple of days - they'd be really hard to
do in a single day.
Look-In always seemed to me very expensive - there are cheaper ways of generating pages than commissioning original artwork page after page, as the comic industry later realised. Was it very expensive to get people like Putzu working weekly?
If you think about what an original photo shoot costs now for something like an FHM or a Vogue then you could still get a lot of equivalent Arnaldo covers for that price today. But in terms of the sort of money another children's magazine/comic would have paid we were way beyond that. But interestingly way under Arnaldo's going rate as maybe the top movie poster artist in the country but I think he saw it as steady work, 50 times a year which would be a nice little earner thank you. It added up to quite a decent whack. So both he and we did quite well out of it. I got into quite a groove with him, based around the picture references and I would do a little scribble of what I wanted. So I would round up the picture reference for him from the TV Times picture library and pages torn from magazines, so he would get a file of picture reference from me. It was amazing - I could roughly picture what he would do with these references I was giving him but nearly always they would come back way better and more … magic than I'd imagined. Wonderful stuff.
Look-In reached an early turning
point with no.39 1972. The middle pages now had a colour
poster (in this first case glam rocker Marc Bolan) different
paper and a more pronounced pop edge, pretty much relaunching
the mag for the rest of the decade. What was happening
there?
I don’t remember the circumstances around that. Certainly the move to pop came about from just spotting what was happening in the market. Comparing Marc Bolan with the lizard is quite a leap!
On the technical side, the early magazines were printed
by gravure the same as TV Times. This is all history
now but photogravure used to be a way of running off
lots of copies very fast, relatively cheaply and with
good colour quality but was highly expensive in setting
up the plates, etching them and so on. So it was a technique
that was good for TV Times who sold several million
copies a week but it soon became obvious that if we
didn’t need nearly as many copies as them we couldn’t
take advantage of the low unit price gravure offered
you.
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