This month the Subs Letter was impaled on a fork.

That which ONLY SUBSCRIBERS KNEW was the lapsed sub ploy.

AP51 marked the second meddling with the Subs Letter by the head of the production department, a gibbering fool who shall remain nameless because I've forgotten it. Experimenting with new effects like the curvy writing for the stuck-through logo, I completed the letter only just in time for the triple-final Janet-Queen-Of-Subs-Letters-enhanced deadline. The next day, alerted by Janet, Queen Of Subs Letters, I scampered to Production to be faced with the department head holding up the finished film and demanding it be redesigned.

The gibbering fool had previously rejected the Man From UNCLE Subs Letter because "This line goes off the page," and this time indicated the background photographs, which had been inverted so they were completely unrecognisable. This was obviously one of those inexplicable lino palpitations and made the joke slightly funnier. But no. The gibbering fool refused to allow the Subs Letter to go to print. It would reflect badly on his department, he insisted, seemingly unmindful of the fact that no one in the whole world cared in the slightest possible way and that the printing deadline was that afternoon.

Once more, Janet, Queen Of Subs Letters saved the day. Smilingly acceding to every gibbering fool demand, she took the film back to her desk to mark up the non-existent errors with a special pen and sent it to the printer the moment the department head went to eat his horrid little lunch.

A few weeks later, the department head went on holiday. His position was filled entirely successfully by a small cardboard replica constructed by the production bods.

Oddly, the two toughest bits of this page were The Game Of Life ("Throw a six to start! Start... Become suspicious... Die") as the dots took ages to space correctly at the corner, and the World Of Strangely Big Things logo, which took years to line up so it curled around the column exactly, and which hasn't come out on this reprint. Another part of the pattern was settled this month with the "AMIGA POWER Subs Letter" bit fatally wounded, only to recover on page two, and I was so pleased with stumbling across the rich shade of blue for the spot colour, it turned up again on AP57's Subs Letter. Unspeakably tedious technical points, then, but they did introduce The Sinister Blueness as a sort of anti-host, so a snap of the fingers for your glazed expression. Rasppp.