The story of Look-in begins way back in the 50's, with a name that Gerry Anderson fans will know immediately - Alan Fennell.  After a few years working on comics, he got his big break as a writer for Anderson, and penned many episodes of Gerry's hit series, including Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds, and later UFO.   Whilst he was working on these scripts he juggled his editorial role on 'TV Comic', and later 'TV Century 21, which was shortened to TV21 (Left) later on.  In 1967 he also diversed into younger children's comics, starting with 'Solo' a very short lived title, and then shortly after one called 'Candy', both included Anderson strips in their repertoires, He remained as Editor of TV21 between 1965-67.  He'd already made a good friend in Angus P. Allan, who scripted a lot of the comics Alan worked on, and would later follow him into Look-in.
 

Working alongside Alan during all this time was an artist he'd later utilise on Look-in - Mike Noble.  Mike worked on 'TV Comic' drawing 'The Lone Ranger', before moving to TV21 to draw 'Fireball XL5' (Right), Zero X and Captain Scarlet.

In 1969 he started another title 'Joe 90: Top Secret', a spin off from TV21. More Look-in protégées in this title, Martin Asbury, and John Cooper who both drew Joe 90 stories.  The title merged with TV21 after 34 issues, John Cooper staying on to draw Thunderbirds.  At this point Alan left to start work on a new publication...

 

In 1971 Alan unveiled his new venture, called 'Look-in', it was to be a junior version of the already popular 'TV Times' Magazine (Left).  The comic was started primarily to give advertising to children of the weeks ITV programming, but it was also one of the first comics, to double as a magazine, and have an equal spread of features as well as strips.  Alan was to edit Look-in until 1974.  He later went on to edit all of the Anderson titles that went with Gerry's resurgence in popularity in the early 90's, I'm not sure what Alan did up until that time.  There was a quiet period after the Anderson thing calmed down a bit, and then I'd heard that Alan had unfortunately died of cancer on 11th December 2001 aged 65.

Amongst the first set of Look-in artists was Vicente Alcazar who drew on later issues of TV21 , doing amongst others, 'Star Trek' (Right).  He started with 'Freewheelers', which was also drawn later by Carlos Pino who drew Star Trek too on 'TV21 and JOE 90'.

Also in the first issue Mike Noble drew 'Timeslip', which was the key opener (for me at least), and a reason most people bought the first issue.  He was semi-retired for a while, but later drew some covers for the aformentioned 90's Anderson titles.