Politikin zabavnik was now issued in color. I clearly remember both smells, the old one of the big format in ordinary roto paper, and this one with a lot more of print paint. The new format was much smaller, 25×33 cm, and the whole impression was quite different.
The black on the color pages wasn't quite there, they didn't print in four tints but rather simulated the black with the other three, which gave it quite a nice hue but didn't succeed always - whenever the plates were slightly misaligned, it would become obvious that this was not one black line. The content remained mostly the same, with the addition of a whole comic in the middle, and a now regular complete SF story, one per issue. They even published a whole novel, in installments, which they did that one time. It was hard to follow that way. The stories were better - the whole old gang lined up there, all of Bradbury and Sheckley and PK Dick and the rest of the bunch. Many times I wondered how do they manage to find so many stories which fit exactly the one page format, they must be manipulating the size of the illustration... Still, who knows whether they shortened any of them to fit.
After a month or two it turned out that finding it on kiosks may be trouble, because the one at šećerana often failed to predict how many to order this time, the magazine was getting too popular, so sometimes I had to walk all the way to Šanta or ruža to buy one. To stop that from happening, and also to save some, dad made me a subscription. So henceforth the Zabavnik started arriving every friday, folded and wrapped in dark brown packing paper, with my address printed on a sticker. The postman would deliver it anytime between ten and noon, rarely before that, and in exceptional cases after. The exceptions were the days when retirement payments woud arrive on fridays. Not that we had too many retirees in the street, it's that the recipients would treat the postman, and he'd stay for a drink...
We stuck with the subscription for some five-six years, and switched back to kiosks, staying with Zabavnik until nineties.
The same kind of transformation happened with Ilustrovana politika, few months before or after. I was eager for good colors, and now here we are with decent print, our standard was raised for that much, so I was taken aback with the layout of pages, because the third page, in color print, carried just readers' mail and the weekly caricature, of which only the frame around the latter was in color, dark blue. So I wrote to the redaction (i.e. editorial staff taken as a collective body), and lo and behold, it got published. Two consequences came out of it: Đuđa's son saw it and then kind of mocked me, but not seriously, just to make a few points, 1) to tell me he saw it, 2) to brag a bit that he knows me, the guy whose words he saw in print. Not much of a fame, but give what you may.
The other consequence was that the editors also slapped their foreheads and promptly moved the readers' mail to pages four and five, while the third page now hosted a full page advertisement. Morale of the story: there's nothing that advertising can't turn into shit.
8-II-2024 - 6-II-2026