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Tops magazine'TOPS' magazine was my favourite read in the early 80s. It was aimed at the 10-14 agegroup roughly (girls and boys) and featured pop and TV interviews, pullout posters, cartoon strips and photo stories, lots of regular features, letters page etc. It may sound a bit like the self-styled junior TV Times Look-in, but it had a lot more character and wit. I've written this page purely because I couldn't find anything else on the web about this now defunct title that I used to love so much ... and am going to fill it full of my memories of the mag and what it featured. I love TOPSTOPS was a weekly mag, it's banner/masthead was the word TOPS that looked as if it had been rubberstamped (ish) onto the front cover - similar to a 'top secret' stamp with an elongated hexagon around it (for want of a far better description, trust me). I can't remember when it first started, maybe some time in 1981, but I did buy the firsst issue. I suspect it was probably advertised on TV and had something free with its first issue. Now I come to think of it, was it a sample pack of space dust style mouth-popping bubble gum? It was very colourful and included a weekly letters section which was the main way it connected with the audience. It introduced the editor and other such characters in the TOPS office such as, um, let me remember: Big Al? Julie? And maybe a Little Al? When the mag first started it had a regular cartoon character, a kind of TOPS mascot, called Thumbthing. He was a thumbprint with arms, eyes and legs and a cheeky grin. I remember on one front cover seeing Thumbthing on a ladder painting the two red stripes on the side of Adam Ant's face when he was heavily into his Prince Charming thing (superimposed obviously). Other sections included Hotch Potch which I think probably had titbits of gossip. And, err, now I come to think of it I can't remember any more section names. At one stage it rebranded as TV TOPS but reverted back shortly before it was pulled off the news stands. Actually that was another gutting thing ... one morning I suddenly received a copy of Suzy through my front door and thought the newsagent had made a mistake. Sadly they hadn't, TOPS had merged with Suzy (a girls mag) to become Suzy/TOPS. Being a lad I was horrified to hav been sent a girls mag, even if it did still have some of the photostories from me old fave. That was a cheap trick incidentally if you used to work for TOPS, no warning at all! Comic StripsTOPS had quite a lot of comic strips, most based on TV shows. Over the years these included: Minder, Hart to Hart and The Adventures of Young Sherlock. I have a feeling that Pamela Stephenson had a strip too?Other comic strips from the mag that I remember very clearly were: The Fantastic Adventures of Adam Ant and Noel Edmonds Life Story!!! The Adam Ant strip, if I recall correctly, was painted by Adam himself. Adam, the then prince of pop, used to borrow from history to create his images and this colourful and interesting comic strip saw Adam in various guises: buccaneer, Dandy, etc, in the historical context playing out all sorts of really 'fantastic' adventures. I loved this! The Noel Edmonds story as a cartoon strip ran across 3 or 4 weeks if I recall correctly. It was in black & white and perhaps a bit of a departure. You gottta remember that Noel was hugely popular at the time with Swap Shop dominating our Saturday mornings. The toon story showed Noel in front of a record deck practicing at being a DJ, I think it included something about pirate radio and also a bit on when Noel nearly went blind! V odd to see a life story in pics like this but really innovative and different. <Photo storiesTOPS was, I think, the first mag aimed at lads that had photo stories in. I'm talking about real photos of real people with speech bubbles coming out of their mouths. These were usually the preserve of teenage girl mags, cos sensitive early-maturing girls need a bit more realism, see. I do vaguely remember Doomlord in the relaunched Eagle magazine being a photo story though. Now, although I remember TOPS having photostories, I can only really remember one: The Witch of Westwood High. Some hideous thing was happening to the kids and/or the school and it was all the fault of one of the teachers, a Miss Morgan I think. Anne Morgan? I think she had 'A Morgan' written on her suitcase and the detective-like kids realised after searching in the library that she was the evil Morgana witch from old. Something like that anyway. It was really great ... and Miss Morgan clearly looked like a witch with bedraggled long dark hair to boot. I think there may have been another photo story called 'Bridge Street Blues' or something like that. Maybe based at another school. The Witch of Westwood High did return in a folllowup story though, I'm pretty sure. I seem to remember a final shot of Morgana the witch shrunk down inside a bottle!?! Other ...TOPS used to make up its own lyrics for current songs in the charts. I remember a re-working of an Adam Ant hit that they called Tandoori Liver.Do you remember those twisty paper things that you used to play with on the playground? You'd get a square of paper, fold the corners in, do other stuff so that you could fit your fingers inside it and then twist it open and closed. On the outside were colours red, blue, yellow, green. ON the inside were numbers and you'd open the flap to revealsome big dark secret ... err, I'm finding this very hard to explain! Anyway, TOPS did a few colourful pop versions of these paper foldy things, I think they had pop trivia questions on them. They had a name but I forget what. There was a regular 3 or 4 picture comic strip by a lad from Lanarkshire. He was a reader who had sent it in and the TOPS team liked it so much they gave him regular space in the mag. I can't remember the name of the character but he had big bulgy eyes, a bit like a weird frog thing. I think there may have been a second reader- designed cartoon strip in the mag too. Did a Spit The Dog (Tiswas) cartoon strip appear in TOPS? There were other freebies attached to the front cover but I forget what they were. TV TOPS wasn't as good as TOPS. If you remember TOPS then drop me an email with your memories ... I'm beginning to think it was just me that read it! :) |