 |
| Copyright REBELLION |
Behold - the cover to the last-ever issue of WHAM! - #187 to be exact. Notice anything strange about it? How about the fact that there's no 'Great news inside for all readers!' banner at the top of the page concerning the periodical's upcoming merger into POW!. This was highly unusual at the time, as most comics usually gave readers a heads-up when there wasn't going to be any more issues of a title.
However, inside, News From The Floor of '64 goes into overdrive, with a response to a letter suggesting that one of the reasons for the merger is to save readers some pocket money, as there'd now be fewer POWER comics to drain their finances. Utter pants of course, but they couldn't exactly say the comics were being merged because circulation on one of them had fallen below a certain point.
Anyway, here are the front and back covers, plus the pages announcing the merger, along with readers' letters. I thought Wham! was a great comic back in the day, but that was mainly because of The FANTASTIC FOUR, FRANKIE STEIN, SAMMY SHRINK, plus maybe one or two others. Did you have a favourite strip? Then tell us what it was in the comments section!
Wham and Smash were my two ace comics in 1966.. The names hit home and as an 8 year old sounded great...Loved Georgies Germs and The Pest Of The West in Wham and we all know The Legend Testers in Smash....Great comics and why they slowly got swallowed up into oblivion beats me . Probably a decision from some overweight guy smoking a cigar. The 60s were a great decade ..Wheres my Tardis I want to go back.
ReplyDeleteThe interesting thing, LH, is that the circulation probably dwarfed that of many of today's comics by a wide margin, yet the decision was taken to merge Wham! and relaunch Smash! because sales weren't deemed sufficient. Crazy, eh?
ReplyDeleteWas it announced on the cover of Pow Kid? I have the last issue of Sun nothing on the cover either but a centre spread similar to the Pink ones announcing it was merging with Lion.
ReplyDeleteTerence
You mean on the last ish of Pow! before it was merged with Smash!? Couldn't say offhand, T, because my Pow!'s are buried in a cupboard at the moment and beyond my immediate reach. I'll get back to you on that.
ReplyDeleteMy Smash!'s were easier to reach and I notice that its upcoming merger with Fantastic wasn't mentioned on the last cover, so it seems likely that Pow!'s proposed merger wasn't mentioned either, T. That's unusual for British comics.
ReplyDeleteThanks Kid. Seems like the power comics were keeping it as low profile as possible.
ReplyDeleteT
Yeah, but I don't know why. Sure, their usual readers would find out when they read the comic anyway, but a casual buyer might have been intrigued by the 'great news inside' on the cover, bought a copy, then decided to buy the merged title on a regular basis.
ReplyDelete