About Jackpot Magazine

Jackpot Magazine

Jackpot was a British weekly anthology comic published by IPC in London. Issue 1 was dated 5 May 1979 and the final issue, number 141, was dated 30 January 1982, when the comic was absorbed into Buster, continuing within the merged Buster and Jackpot from the following week. In less than three years Jackpot assembled a large roster of humour and adventure strips, from its namesake Jack Pott to The Winners, who took over its cover from issue 101, and it remains a well-documented example of the late IPC humour comic, catalogued by reference sources including International Hero and British comics histories.

The anthology comic was the standard form of British children's publishing: a weekly package of short strips, each with its own character and premise, of which the strongest survived and the weakest were replaced. Jackpot's history, its launch, naming, rotating covers, strip-by-strip roster and eventual merger, can be reconstructed in unusual completeness. That makes it an ideal specimen for understanding how IPC created, managed and retired comics at the turn of the 1980s, when the market that had sustained titles for decades was beginning to contract under pressure from television and changing childhood habits.

IPC in 1979 and the Anthology Formula

Jackpot was launched by IPC, the London publishing group whose comics division, heir to the Fleetway and Amalgamated Press traditions, dominated British children's comics. IPC's method was industrial and proven: identify a gap or a mood in the market, commission a stable of strips around strong one-line concepts, launch with promotion and free gifts, and manage the title by reader response, merging it into a stronger stablemate if sales faltered. Jackpot, arriving in May 1979 in a stable alongside Buster, Whizzer and Chips and Whoopee!, was a product of that system at its most practised.

The anthology formula spread risk across a dozen or more features. No single strip had to carry the comic; a reader who tired of one character found others in the same issue, and editors could test new strips inside an established package and retire those that polled badly. Jackpot mixed humour strips with light adventure, school and family stories and science-fiction-tinged comedy, pitched at the core British comics audience of children of roughly primary and early secondary school age. Its 141 issues represent the formula working as designed: a varied, cheerful weekly package sustained for nearly three years.

Named After Jack Pott

Jackpot took its name from Jack Pott, the gambling-obsessed character who had originated in the earlier IPC comic Cor!! The title promised luck, winning and sudden fortune, attractive ideas for a comic competing for children's pocket money, and it tied the new launch to a character some readers already knew. Jack Pott himself appeared among the comic's strips, his eternal schemes to strike it rich supplying the knockabout comedy his name implied, and his presence gave the title a mascot rooted in IPC tradition rather than invented from nothing.

Curiously, Jack Pott was not the comic's regular cover star. British anthology covers were valuable advertising space, usually given to the strip the editors wished to push hardest that week, and Jackpot's covers rotated among its strips for its first hundred issues. The naming therefore worked at the level of brand rather than cover: a memorable, lucky title under which any of the comic's characters could appear. Only later in the run did a single feature claim the cover permanently, a change that itself tells a story about how the comic's internal hierarchy settled.

The Humour Strips: Wraggs, Sulk and Full O'Beans

The comic core of Jackpot was a set of single-concept humour strips whose titles stated their jokes. Richie Wraggs followed a cheerful lad from the wrong side of the tracks whose poverty was played for warmth and ingenuity rather than misery. The Incredible Sulk turned a child's bad mood into a superpower-sized comedy of stubbornness. Full O'Beans celebrated irrepressible energy, while Angel's Proper Charlies followed a girl and her chaotic charges, one of the comic's relatively few female-led humour features, alongside Milly O'Naire and Penny Less, whose paired names made a joke of wealth and poverty that mirrored Richie Wraggs from the other side of the street.

G

remlins brought small-scale domestic chaos to the page, and Kid King played on the comedy of a child monarch, a premise with obvious appeal to readers who spent their days obeying adults. Taken together, these strips show IPC humour at the end of the 1970s: punning titles, instantly legible premises, and comedy built from class, family and school, the three worlds its readers knew.

Adventure and Invention: Laser Eraser, Jake's Seven and Robot Smith

Jackpot balanced its humour with strips of light adventure and invention. Laser Eraser followed young Ernie, who was given an alien device that could erase anything from existence and then restore it, a premise of unlimited comic and narrative potential in a schoolboy's hands. Robot Smith presented the adventures of a robotic boy, domesticating science fiction into a family setting. The Amazing Three supplied team adventure, while The Terror Toys turned the contents of the toy box into menace, a reliably thrilling idea for its audience.

Jake's Seven, a gang of children led by Jake who enjoyed adventures with a science-fiction bent, wore its inspiration openly: the name parodied the television series Blake's 7, then current on British television. Such parodies were a Jackpot habit. Other strips in the comic's orbit spoofed The Sweeney as Teeny Sweeney, a team of pre-teen crimefighters, and The Good Life as It's a Nice Life, about a family attempting self-sufficiency in the suburbs, while Terry and Gavin's Funtastic Journey echoed the television series Fantastic Journey. The comic's writers assumed, correctly, that their readers were television viewers first, and built bridges from the screen to the page.

Everyday Comedy: Sporty, Cry Baby and It's a Nice Life

A third strand of Jackpot was everyday comedy rooted in recognisable childhood experience. Sporty followed a boy obsessed with every sport going, whose enthusiasm reliably outran his talent. Cry Baby centred on Tina, a girl whose crying at virtually anything produced a literal flood of tears, turning an playground insult into a visual superpower. It's a Nice Life, the self-sufficiency parody, grounded its comedy in gardens, neighbours and suburban embarrassment, subjects close to the lives of the families who bought the comic.

These gentler strips are easy to overlook beside the high-concept adventures, but they performed essential work in the anthology balance. They gave younger readers entry points, gave the comic warmth between its louder features, and reflected the British humour comic's long tradition of finding the fantastic inside the ordinary street, school and home. Jackpot's mixture, high concept and homely in the same weekly package, is precisely what the IPC anthology system was designed to deliver.

The Winners Take the Cover

The Winners joined Jackpot in issue 75 and their rise through the comic was steady. A team strip with an aspirational title perfectly matched to the comic's own name, The Winners proved popular enough to change the comic's presentation: from issue 101 they took over the cover, ending the long period in which covers had rotated among the strips. In British comics, the cover was the shop window; assigning it permanently to one feature was an editorial declaration about which strip best sold the package.

The change also marks the point at which Jackpot, two years into its life, had a settled identity. Launch comics rotate covers while editors discover what readers respond to; mature comics know their strengths. That The Winners, a strip introduced midway through the run rather than at launch, won the cover shows the anthology system working as intended, with new material tested inside the comic and promoted on merit. When the end came a year later, it came from the economics of the overall market, not from any failure of the comic to find its formula.

Merger into Buster, January 1982

Jackpot's final issue, number 141, was dated 30 January 1982, and the comic was then absorbed into Buster. The merger followed the standard IPC ritual, announced to readers as great news: the combined title, Buster and Jackpot, appeared from 6 February 1982, with Buster himself introducing the incoming strips to his readers. Surviving Jackpot features continued inside the merged comic, among them Milly O'Naire and Penny Less, who were paired in the new order with Buster's Ivor Lott and Tony Broke, their wealth-and-poverty comedy counterparts, while other Jackpot strips, including the girl-led features that had already been retired, did not make the crossing.

Mergers were the British comics industry's way of managing decline without admitting it: the weaker title's readers were transferred to the stronger, its best strips preserved, and its name carried in the masthead for a period as a bridge. Buster absorbed many titles across its forty-year life, from Radio Fun and Film Fun to Cor!!, Monster Fun and, after Jackpot, School Fun, Nipper, Oink! and Whizzer and Chips. Jackpot's absorption was therefore no disgrace but the normal retirement of an IPC anthology, executed by the book, with its characters redistributed among the survivors.

Jackpot's Place in British Comics History

Jackpot is remembered by collectors and historians as a complete, well-catalogued example of the last confident years of the British weekly humour anthology. Its entire run is short enough to collect and documented enough to study strip by strip, from Jack Pott and Richie Wraggs to Laser Eraser and The Winners, and reference sources such as International Hero preserve its roster in detail. The comic arrived just before home video, computer games and a fragmenting children's market transformed the industry, and its pages show the old system at full stretch: television parodies, punning one-line concepts, rotating covers and a merger waiting at the end.

For the children who bought it between May 1979 and January 1982, none of that analysis mattered. Jackpot was a weekly promise of jokes, robots, erasers, winners and floods of tears, delivered in a package whose very name suggested that this week's sixpence, or its decimal equivalent, might be the lucky one. British comics history is built from such promises, kept 141 times in Jackpot's case, and the comic's tidy, fully recorded life makes it one of the best documents historians have of how the promise was kept.