File:WACCI 28.jpg

I really love this WACCI cover page. It is the first one that I can look back at without wincing. It was does by the old fashioned "cut and paste" montage method. Yes the whole thing was placed down on to a sheet of A4 and then sent to the printer as "camera-ready" copy. Cummon, you'd have to be pretty dammed stupid to mess up a New Years Eve front cover with Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and a stopwatch that showed the time ticking over from 1988 to 1989 wouldn't you? Wouldn't you?? Hang on, who the heck thought of the concept? Yeah nearly 20 years later I can look at this cover and marvel about it. Clark's hair bleeding up over the black picture-border and up into the Logo area? The clean cutting of the original photos onto a white background. Marilyn's left arm overlapping the right border. The sleeve of the hand holding the stopwatch - it shaves the 1cm black border in two. Then of course the stopwatch - normally counting seconds - appears to be counting down the years... Totally bonkers, WACCI Logo, Contact details, two sex gods and a crazy stopwatch all perfectly placed on the page and then the knockout punch - a single headline box "SEASON'S GREETINGS from the Editor And His Assistant" Dear Lordy Lordy this was a GOOD cover. We had miles of fun with it Our monthly post-bag trebled. People who knew me wrote in to say "How dare you have the audacity to use Mr. Gable's image as your own - you ugly person BUT people bought in to the deliberate lie and assumed that the ensuing falsehood was true. Joolz was the Letters Editor at that time - not the Editor's Assistant. Readers (I can't say mistakenly because I planned it) somehow began to associate the image of MM with Joolz... and there began a whole other set of problems that computer magazine editors don't normally have to deal with. O.K. This was my sole creation and I now release it out into the public domain. Just give me some of mention in the small print eh?