Christmas Comics: LOOK-IN (1971)

Kicking off a short series of festive blog posts, here are a few pages from the first Christmas issue of Look-In, dated 25th December 1971. (Click on images to see them larger.) Dubbed the 'Junior TV Times', Look-In was published by Independent Television Publications Ltd (as was the TV Times then) and featured strips based on popular ITV shows. The wraparound cover above is by Arnaldo Putzu, who was the comic's regular cover artist and an illustrator of film posters of the day.

The comic's 24 pages contained a variety of humour and adventure strips but it's only the humour strips I'm showing here as the adventure serials didn't have a festive theme. First up, here's Crowther in Trouble, featuring ex-BBC Crackerjack star Leslie Crowther, drawn by the prolific Tom Kerr...

Please Sir! was a popular comedy series and to me seemed to be a mixture of the movie To Sir With Love and The Beano's Bash Street Kids! The strip in Look-In was drawn by the versatile Graham Allen...

A spin-off from Please Sir! was the TV series The Fenn Street Gang, about Class 5C's adventures after leaving school, featuring the actors who could no longer convincingly play 15 year olds. Artwork for the strip by that man Tom Kerr again, a familiar artist of seventies comics...

The strip version of On the Buses was drawn by Harry North, an excellent artist, although Olive's reaction to being blasted in the face by a shower in the last panel seems oddly static. 

Look-In also carried several feature pages. Curious as to what was on TV back then? Here's a selection of ITV highlights for Christmas 1971. I seem to remember watching the Mike and Bernie Winters All Star Christmas Comedy Carnival which contained new mini-episodes of various comedy series (a bit like Children In Need does now). 

More festive fun soon!