The Next Month Page

AP14 to AP60

AP's pioneering Next Month Strip stands alone as a device of unreliable prediction, never copied by the mags that followed.* But eventually we had to chase it from the premises with a broom, leaving us with a tricky dilemma. (Misguided attempt to redesign a classic, them tricky dilemmas - Ed.) The ignominy of a full Next Month page was too much to bear - who could justify wasting so much space in the non-stop cram-joy that was bursting's AMIGA POWER? - yet we felt some trifling obligation to you, our lovely readers, who tended to hang about in shops a lot scuffing and moping.

The simple but ingenious solution was the Next Month Blob, a circle on the contents page that displayed the necessary information in the minimum space. (Or, more accurately, a diminishingly exaggerated oval on the etc etc, as if demonstrating the cartoon principle of squash-and-stretch in the form of an inchingly landing ball or something. It settled down by about AP20, anyway.) The blob discharged its unflowery duties from AP16 to AP34.

Alert readers may notice that this overlaps with the Next Month Strip, which ran until AP32, but there's a simple explanation for this. AP16's Strip was, as usual, printed early because it was on the back cover. Shortly afterwards, AP learned the mag was now to be printed on "the third Thursday in every month" (rather than the fourth Friday) and thus the essentially disseminated info of AP17's shimmering enbeingness ("August 27th") was factually inaccurate. (The new date, aidingly cocooned in the nurturing Blob, was "July 20th." Don't ask us.) And the reason the Blob co-existed beside the Strip for the next sixteen issues was, of course, that (Bang!) Oh no! (Dies.)

We fast-forward to AP34 by running around with jerky motions because the remote-control's batteries have gone flat. Here we see, at last, the hatching of the Next Month Blob into the full-plumage Next Month Page, a traditionally hasty replacement for undelivered games. The Page had popped up at least once previously in the same circumstances as a pilot, but AP34 marked its successful commission as a series (overlapping with the final Next Month Blob because of (Bang!) Oh no! (Dies again)). Cleverly written as a character in its own right ("Whatever Next?", the so-called "83rd APer") the Next Month Page chatted about its life beyond AP, its chums (including the contents page from Marie-Claire) and, if space permitted, dropped its science on those assembled on what would be happening in the following ish.

Whatever Next?'s triumphant run continued unbroken until AP42, when it was replaced by nothing at all. For some reason, it was no longer important to explain when the next ish was coming out, perhaps because we'd completely given up the pretence of knowing for certain ourselves. This state of merry existentialism continued until AP51, when two reviews fell through at the last moment, but Whatever Next? was itself engaged at the Old Vic as a programme, necessitating the rapidly improvised filler Any Port In a Storm.

The dramatic true story of The The Next Month Page Story was not yet over. In AP55 the page explodingly returned to appreciative eyelash-flickers from the swiftly calcifying readership, sustaining a record-unbreaking presence for that entire month before vanishing again forever, only to reappear unexpectedly for one very last final time in AP60 (as "Coming Attractions," its sparkling new stage-name) when a resigning Ad Bod accidentally forgot to finish their job before leaving.

The Next Month Page is currently enjoying a Hollywood career as the audience's favourite Evil English-Accent Piece of Paper - it played the sinister schematics in Terminator 2, for instance - but remembers AP kindly and has offered to make a cameo in AP2 when we next plan an update, which is obviously (Bang!) Oh no! (Dies unambiguously.)