Starlord

Juuuust about scraping in at the end of my remit for this Blog, Starlord was following IPC's tried and tested of "launch a title, launch a similar-themed sister title, run them alongside each other for a while, then merge the least selling of the two with the other."

So, this stablemate of 2000AD had the SF theme, a figurehead in Starlord (a nice design by Ian Gibson, but prefer the ape mask of Tharg), and the hook that each strip was created to train the "Star Troopers" (that was us lot) in all manner of future warfare/life.

Everyone knows of the "Strontium Dog" and "Ro-Busters" strips, and they were very good, but i really rated Planet Of The Damned and Timequake - especially the latter when drawn by the crimingly over-looked Ian Kennedy.

The free badge give-away was much nicer than usual and i've still got my one - the best in my opinion, the robot squad.

What also made it stand out were the back page photo features, with modelwork by my good friend Martin Bower (model maker for Space 1999, Alien, Blake's 7, Dr Who, Flash Gordon etc). And for which he didn't get paid incidentally...