First of all may I take this opportunity to thank everyone of you who has written to CRASH to say how much you liked the launch issue of the magazine. A magazine like CRASH relies so heavily on the goodwill of its readers and the support of the software houses. I can already see that we are going to get a lot of feedback from you, and you can be sure that we shall do our level best to incorporate any ideas you may have. But I should also like to thank the software houses who have been so generous with their compliments.
A magazine is a living entity — a kind of three-way partnership between publisher, reader and advertiser. After all the advertiser is the one who produces the games that you want to buy. What the magazine has to do is act as a forum for information — and that’s what we intend to be. That is a major reason for the CRASH HOTLINE (which is obviously proving very popular too)! It offers the reader an opportunity to tell us (and in turn the software houses) what you enjoy. There may be some teething troubles with the HOTLINE because it has exceeded our expectations, so you may find it constantly engaged! We apologise for any inconvenience, and suggest you use the write-in coupon if you have problems. We are doing our best to make further arrangements to expand the phone system to cope. But keep it up!
Along the same lines of sussing out what you like, we are planning a CRASH QUESTIONAIRE for issue three. The more people who fill this in, the better and more accurate the results will be. It will help us in presenting information in a way you prefer, and we hope it will be of benefit to the software producers too. So look out for that next month.
I’d like to thank readers for all the nice letters that we have received already (as I write CRASH issue 1 has only been on sale for a week) and quite a number of you expressed an interest in our comic strip THE TERMINAL MAN. So to satisfy your curiosity, here a few details about the two people who make the strip possible.
Oliver Frey poses for a CRASH MICRO publicity still.
Artist Oliver Frey, who is also designer for CRASH Magazine, has been drawing comic strips for longer than he cares to remember starting off with IPC’s War Picture Library series of which he did over twenty. Some are being reprinted even now. He has also done a lot of illustrative work for the old Look & Learn and drew that publication’s strip The Trigan Empire for over a year before the comic was stopped. He had a close brush with Superman too. If you’ve seen the film (the first part that is), perhaps you remember at the very beginning, the little boy reading his Superman comic that then turned into the title sequence? The whole comic book was only two specially drawn pages which Oliver did for director Dick Donner to use in the film.
In recent months Oliver has been busy with several Dan Dare strips for the Eagle annuals, and has also drawn the weekly version in the comic. In The Terminal Man Oliver has been partly responsible for planting the seed of the idea in the writer’s mind.
Author of the The Terminal Man is Kelvin Gosnell. Kelvin wanted to be a pilot. Two physical drawbacks thwarted this ambition: less than perfect eyesight (medically undesirable) and a propensity to throw up during aerobatics (undesirable for cleaners of cockpits). He therefore resigned himself to a non-aerial life many years ago and was delighted, shortly afterwards, to discover that he not only enjoyed writing about flying but that people were willing to pay him money to do it.
His writing career started on the comic Action in 1975, scripting a World War 1 tale called Suicide Club. A long enthusiasm for science fiction was rekindled when he realised there was no SF comic in the UK. The result was the very successful 2000 AD comic launched in 1978 and a top seller today. Kelvin became its editor.
Since then he has handled a number of strip characters from Dan Dare in the UK to Storm in The Netherlands. He continues to handle feature work, particularly in aviation, since he discovered this gets him free flights in an assortment of flying machines. He cannot decide what has been his best aerial experience — playing at the Battle of Britain in a Tiger Moth v Chipmunk dogfight over Kent was good, but so was being ‘target for the day’ for an RAF rescue Sea King in Norfolk.
In last month’s issue we gave an incorrect price in the review for GRAND PRIX DRIVER by Britannia. The price of £5.95 quoted should have read £6.95.
Also, in our Guide section the review JUNGLE TROUBLE should have ascribed the game firmly to Durrell Software, the producers of the game, as Martech are actually Durrell’s distributor and have no hand in the writing or producing of the game. We apologise for our error.