Out of interest, JB, did you have to fight to keep it off the cover (and thus breaking up the whiteness) or did common sense automatically prevail?

That does not satisfy a conspiracy view, please revise accordingly ;-)

* * *

Ha! Thanks for responding, JB.

I too have find memories of this issue. 

My maternal grandmother used to pick up my comics from her local newsagent but failed to collect this particular issue. The ad on the inside front cover, I recall, created an almost grease-like stain on the cover itself (probably highlighted because it was predominately blank) and she assumed that it had been created by somebody putting their pie or other food on it. I had to wait until the weekend to buy the issue myself and can remember reading it on the car journey on the way home. Not once did I see it as a gag or a gimmick presumably accepting it as a legitimate way to tell the story.

I can also remember the letters page that comment on AF 13, specifically the silent nightmare sequence, and one reader commented that they preferred your pictures without words to your words without pictures. It was a nice line but to me both were fitting to the stories they were telling. I am not sure I could ever say one was more successful than the other.

(Some wag has probably already suggested somewhere that AF 13 allowed you to meet a deadline as you didn't need towrite the first ten pages or so. On that note, JB or anyone, do / did letterers get paid for a whole issue regardless of whether words appear on each page or not?)

That being said though, would we still be talking about that issue 30 years later if he'd rendered the pages like I wanted him to?

;-)