J Nash

There were no Subs Letters from AP45 to AP48 because I could never seem quite to get round to it. Obviously I was severely overworked with about seven pages a month and spoiling other people's jokes by crossing bits of them out. And, hey, time just flew by on the non-stop merry-go-round of antics and tomfoolery that was AMIGA POWER.

On the day AP49's Subs Letter was due, Isabelle Rees wrote in asking where the blinkety heck the contractually obliged sheets had gone. I scurryingly responded with a shoddy placeholder that was AP44's with approximately twelve words changed, and a huge picture of Inspector Sixties Inverted Title Sequence replacing p2. (I haven't bothered scanning this one either. It's just a big red apology, saying, "Er, this month's gone wrong as well.")

Thus AP50, which I started approximately the next morning. (Apart from having to use the Art Mac, which obviously I could do in the evenings, there was a genuine technical obstacle; at this point in history, there was one scanner for the entire games mag division, which I'd have to commandeer for several hours at a time with enormous armfuls of mysterious magazines and annuals. Aggravatingly, there'd always seem to be someone there before me, scanning Japanese ads for "work" or "pornographic desktop pictures" or something. Planning ahead, that was the key to the AP Subs Letters. Tragically, the AP Subs Letters were by me.)

Note the switch to red, which I'd just found out you could do for the miserable AP49 guilt-pape, and the accompanyingly overcompensating 5,000-scan photo-story. Plus! Where's Peter?, possibly the most grievously appalling treatment of death in the history of the mag, at which I laugh heartily whenever I see (it); and Stevens McWhilliker, with whom I was pleased as an impenetrable joke about terrible films, and who Cam greeted with a special face and the question, "Why have you scanned in a fat nude man?"

Keenly alert readers' eyes may notice that this month's speech bubbles aren't a uniform, slightly awkward shape. This is because all previous bubs had been the legacy of YS's Art Ed, The Legendary Andy O, who had bequeathed me a specially drawn set. But, because of strange technical reasons associated with forgetting the original filename, the speech bubbles always came out grotesquely bitty on the page. (Strangely, only when used in the mag, as in the Gerald Falsely column. The Subs Letter versions retained their smooth noodle maps.) Sue then pointed out that, with the new version of layout program Quark, you could place perfect speech bubbles of any shape and angle by drawing a circle then stretching a bit out of it to make a tail. This was an excellent moment. Thanks, Sue. (Although this might have happened in AP44, come to think of it.)