Wear Your Bagde With Pride!
2004-03-10

Dear Mister Sprowt,

I am a yung sproutlet who is just getting into reeding comix. I enjoy your collums on the 20000AD Revue websight, and I bin wondrin how you got into reeding comix. Were they very diffrent wen you where mi age?

Love, Wagner Mills, Bonnie, Scotchland.

Dear Wagner,

Yes, comics were a lot different in those days! Modern youngsters choose their comics based on how much money the comic will be worth in the future. They don't ever read these comics, and instead preserve them for all time inside indestructible plastic bags. In my day, however, comics were printed on nice soft paper which meant that when you finished reading the comic you could put it to another use.

Also, we didn't have a lot of money to spend; I understand that modern kids' pocket money is often as much as £2.50 per week! We were not so lucky: we could afford very few comics, and chose them based on the estimated worth of their first issues' free gifts.

The purpose of the Free Gift was to entice kids into getting used to the idea of parting with some of their money on a weekly basis: years of careful research demonstrated that three weeks of free gifts was the minimum required to get the kids hooked. Following the third week, the publishers would resort to another trick to catch the undecided: they would print a multi-part cut-out-and-keep thingy, often a poster or an impossibly complex board game.

2000 AD's first free gift was the infamous Space Spinner, about which more than enough has been written by myself and others. Their second free gift was the Biotronic Man stickers (so named, presumably, to suggest an association with a then-popular TV show). One was intended to stick these on various parts of one's body in order to fool incredibly myopic and dense people into thinking that one is a cyborg. The actual purpose of this escaped me at the time and escapes me still. Following that, we had the Red Alert wallet, which was supposed forewarn us of impending danger.

Now... About six months after their launch, most comics would issue more free gifts because they had a dip in sales. His name was Ted Brannigan, and he was crap at his job. But the editors of 2000 AD had wisely chosen not to hire Mister Brannigan for their sales department, and so they didn't need to give away any further free gifts until prog 178, about three and a half years after the comic started. It is rumoured that around this time Ted Brannigan joined the 2000 AD staff under a false name.

That free gift with prog 178 was a metal Judge Dredd badge, and it was good! I still have mine, but sadly my Space Spinner went the way of most flying free gifts (it ended up in the garden of a scary neighbour, where - to the best of my knowledge - it still resides), my Biotronic Man stickers proved to be incompatible with bath water, and my Red Alert wallet failed to warn me that the school bully was going to beat me up and steal it.

 

Starlord had somewhat better free gifts. At least, the first two were better. In issue one, we got a shiny cardboard badge that denoted the branch of Starlord's armed forces into which we had been drafted. I'm praying that Starlord never calls up the troopers of the Robot Regiment, because my sticker is not easily available: it's still in my secret hiding place under the floorboards. In the house I grew up in. And from which my parents moved ten years ago.

In issue two, we got the Space Calculator. This was two bits of card, one folded over with holes in it, the other goes inside the first one and you slide it up and down to read information on planets and such. Amazingly, I still have this! I'm looking at it right now! (Well, not right now as you're reading this, but right now as I'm writing it). In fact, two years ago I was asked to present a talk on astronomy to a bunch of school kids, and my sole source of information was my Space Calculator. And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for those pesky kids asking difficult questions like "Yes, but what's that in kilometres?"

Issue three of Starlord, however, we were given "Starblast"... What a stinker! This single piece of laminated card was nothing more than a version of Battleships. Seconds of fun for all the family. I still feel ripped off about that one.

A year later Tornado was launched... Issue 1 came free with what can only be described as a military-grade Space Spinner. This absolutely lethal three-legged boomerang thingy could go for miles with a good tail-wind! Mine nearly decapitated one of my neighbours, knocked the aerial off another neighbour's car, and - once I'd mastered it - turned out to be incredibly useful for getting conkers out of trees. I've no idea where it is now, though I suspect that my parents secretly confiscated it and turned it over to the authorities to be disposed of in a controlled explosion.

But I do still have some of the free gifts that came with other comics... Not including a large stack of faded posters with thumb-tack holes in the corners, I'm the proud owner of the flimsy and embarrassing-to-be-seen-in mask from the first issue of Captain Britain, the rather excellent badge from issue 2 of the relaunched Eagle, and two more Space Calculator-like thingies: a "Speed Slide" from an early issue of the deservedly-forgotten 1980 IPC title Speed, and a Dinosaur one from another IPC comic, though I have absolutely no recollection of the source of this one.

Yes, the noble free gift was a Good Thing. Well, sometimes. The DC Thomson comics usually came with a tiny clip-together toy, or something useless like a cheap tin ring which you could decorate with one of a number of stickers (Bullet), or a cheap plastic wristband which you could decorate with one of a number of stickers (The Crunch), or a cheap tin medallion... etc.

The UK Marvel comics tended to only have free gifts for the first issue - maybe two issues if you were very lucky (issue 2 of Captain Britain came with a cardboard "boomerang" that lasted almost as long as it took to put the thing together). Posters were the norm, because they were cheap to produce and they could be bound into the comic, which I'm sure made distribution a lot easier.

Marvel UK's Star Wars comics fared a little better: the first issue came with an X-wing Fighter made out of card, which actually flew! With issue 2 we got its companion, a Tie Fighter, which actually crashed! And in 1983, issue 9 of Marvel UK's Return of the Jedi offered a very unique free gift... Who says that comics stunt literacy?

Other comics would offer a free Spud Gun (you youngsters with your PlayStations and X-Boxes! You don't know what real fun is until you have a Spud Gun!), or a folded-over piece of card that you flap about to make a kind of flapping sound (am I really the only person who can remember those?), or something you blew into to generate a particular noise that was 100% guaranteed to annoy parents.

But... Let's be honest here: Were any of us ever really tempted to buy a comic solely because of the free gift?

Yes, of course we were! We were kids, for crying out loud! We didn't know any better!

Interestingly, the first issue of the relaunched Eagle came with... A Space Spinner, which just goes to show that five years on from the launch of 2000 AD, the good folks at IPC didn't know any better either.