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By Lloyd Mangram
December
1987
Issue 47
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When
you're wandering around a newsagent's, what grabs the
attention is a cover with a striking design or image.
In taking Incentive's Freescape game Driller
as a cover theme, Oliver gave himself a problem: to
make it obvious what the painting was about, it had
to contain recognisable elements from the game or the
adverts, yet those were not action-packer, Driller
being a more cerebral game. And of course much of Driller's
power came from its peculiar 3-D graphics, which would
be hard to recreate without straight copying. So he
opted for the fish-eye lens image, a neat notion which
wraps virtually 360° of view into one picture.
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Judge Death also appeared on the cover, drawing attention
to the 16-page supplement inside the issue. This had been
set up in conjunction with Piranha, to tie in with their Judge
Death licensed game, after their interest in the OINK! supplement.
It was generally agreed that something from 2000AD would
be even more likely to involve CRASH and ZZAP!'s readers than
OINK!. 2000AD's publishers were unwilling to participate -
the title had just been bought by Robert Maxwell's BMPC group
- but Titan Books, who held rights not to the 2000AD characters
themselves but to all the printed stories and artwork, were
about to launch a Judge Anderson reprint series and were liaising
with Piranha on the game of Judge Death. Titan were persuaded
to contribute the supplement artwork, in colour.
The 2000AD stories were in black and white, so the supplement
in colour in CRASH and ZZAP! was something of a novelty. Titan's
artist took the original pages, shot them to film to make
a black-and-white image, then photocopied each page by a special
process which rendered the image in a very pale blue. This
gave him a design which he could colour in, the blue photocopy
barely registering. The coloured pages were then sent to us
together with the monochrome film, and we had the colour laser-scanned
to provide the necessary four-colour separations. We combined
them with the Titan's monochrome film, and suddenly, there
was Judge Death in full colour.
Apart from the supplement - which prevented the third part
of this CRASH History going in the issue, because there weren't
enough pages to fit them both in as well as all the usual
content of CRASH - and the background feature on 2000AD and
Titan Books, this CRASH had the first half of Robin Candy's
huge feature on tie-ins. It was an appropriate time to examine
the growth of tie-ins over four years; licences seemed to
be growing ever more important, and CRASH was in retrospective
mood anyway.
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