Timeslip in Look-In

The Comic Strip

The stories were written, more often than not, by Angus P. Allan and illustrated at first by Michael Noble. Both had been stalwarts of the legendary TV Century 21 comic of the sixties. TV Century 21 was devoted to the TV shows of Gerry & Sylvia Anderson and included strip versions of their many supermarionation productions.

It was edited by Alan Fennell who went to become the founding editor of “Look-in”.

The Timeslip comic strip began in issue 1.1. It was spread across the centre pages and in glorious vivid colour. In it, Liz and Simon find themselves exiting the time barrier into a strange and apparently prehistoric jungle whilst Liz’s parents (and a somewhat more benign Commander Traynor than appeared in the TV series) worried about them back in present day St. Oswald. The likeness of Cheryl Burfield and Spencer Banks were excellent. Noble used stills of the two actors taken on the sets of The Time of the Ice Box and hence the two characters retained the costumes from that serial (Simon, his off white jumper and Liz, her brown cardigan.) for the duration of the strip’s run. The prehistoric world was revealed to be a future version of Earth and the two teenagers eventually found themselves tumbling to a new adventure halfway through episode five. Noble continued to handle the art chores for the first twenty-six instalments, all of which remained in colour.

In issue 1.27, the strip shifted to make way for an adaptation of Follyfoot – a filmed series from Yorkshire Television about a riding stables and the various young characters that inhabited it. Noble left Timeslip to draw this, leaving the strip to less memorable artists. It was also now in grey tone.

As the strip continued into 1972, it became more and more divorced from the original television series which had ended nearly a year previously. No longer was the time barrier located at St. Oswald but now it had a bizarre habit of scooping up Liz and Simon when they least expected it and allowing them to travel not just in time but into outer space and other planets. A later story had the teenagers meet the Victorian enigma, Spring-heeled Jack.

The strip ended in issue 2.50 with the conclusion of an off-the-wall two part adventure which even dispensed with the time barrier itself and saw Liz and Simon transported to a surreal Earth courtesy of a mysterious UFO.

A comic strip also appeared in the 1972 “Look-in” annual and saw the two children catapulted by the time barrier to a future world dominated by a bald headed super villain known only as “The Botanist” (!) Like the strip in the weekly comic, the annual story suggested that the time barrier and the Ministry field were located near the sea on the Cornish coast.

In 1974, to coincide with the TV serial’s re-run on the ITV network, “Look-in” reprinted ‘The Maid of Falmouth’ colour Timeslip strip in black and white in its Summer Special.