Big Comic Fortnightly Holiday Special 1994

Big Comic Fortnightly had begun in June 1988, and the first special came out that same year, although as Big Comic Fortnightly was similar to a holiday special anyway it's tricky to spot the difference at first glance - even the covers were similar. The only real difference was the page count and price; the first one had 135 pages for 95p, quite an increase from 52 pages for 35p. The covers improved with the 1992 special when Terry Bave was given the cover, and he produced some lovely full-page illustrations. The last one, the one I'm looking at here, came out in 1994. Big Comic Fortnightly was in its final months by now; it would fold in January 1995 under the name Big Comic Monthly. This special was £1.35 for 104 pages, and with exception to the front cover it was entirely reprints. It had come out in May 1994 and was in the stores for several months, here's the first advert for it, from a May edition of Buster:

The following year Big Comic Fortnightly, along with the Best of Monthly comics, were all merged together to produce The BVC, or The Big Value Comic, to give it its full name. That meant that instead of another Big Comic Fortnightly special it was replaced by a BVC special in the summer of 1995, of which only one was produced, as BVC was a failure. Oddly enough, the BVC special was more expensive and had fewer pages - £1.45 for 100 pages. I don't own the BVC special, in fact I've never actually seen an issue of BVC for sale (and I have been looking), so here's the cover taken from the ComicsUK cover gallery:

Of course, despite being entirely reprints there is still some good stuff in this special, and here's a few pages to round the post off.