What better way to signpost your devotion to the latest short-lived elaborately-coiffured pop sensation than by forking out three times the cost of an issue of Smash Hits on a huge fold-out poster with some extremely basic biographical details on the reverse? Well that’s what pop fans did in their thousands in the eighties, with each successive gaggle of generally girl-orientated popsters inspiring an ozone layer-depleting amount of said items. The journalistic content, it has to be said, was never of a particularly high standard, but then again neither were the posters themselves, invariably involving some unexciting photo session cast-off that the publishers presumably had to pay less money for. Sometimes you’d get a bizarre short story or comic strip, usually involving John Taylor being kidnapped and held for ransom before an important gig or some ‘Bros In The Haunted Castle’-type comedy shenanigans, and there was always the inevitable ‘Battle Of The Bands’, wherein the posterrific subject would be scored against their nearest rivals and invariably win by a single point. Six months later, both would be replaced by entirely new names as if nothing had happened, and the Postermag juggernaut rolled on and on until [INSERT SOME NONSENSE ABOUT FACELESS DANCE ACTS DESTROYING THE PRECIOUS POP FIRMAMENT HERE]
Applemask
August 27, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Relatively late entry: 1995’s useless “Doctor Who Poster Magazine”, which I have two of: about Daleks and Cybermen. I actually liked them at the time, because I had no access to any other Doctor Who knowledge and pictures bar some Target books and Timeframe, so it seemed vaguely fresh and interesting to me, even though it wasn’t.
Richard Davies
August 10, 2010 at 5:37 pm
Some football magazines tried having a full time posters folding out.
One of my friends at school used one as a book cover, & drew on many arrows though heads, scars, eye patches, cigars hanging out of mouths etc. onto players he didn’t like.