The Secret Origin of Mighty Comic #122: The variant

 KG Murray's Mighty Comic #122 was published c.March-April 1978:

The cover is an in-house production, sourced from the splash page to the cover-featured story, The World of Doomed Olsens!:

This issue is fully-indexed on AusReprints.

Recently, James Zanotto alerted me to a variant of this issue:

By variant I mean a copy subject to an obvious production error, something relatively rare yet not unknown in Murray's output. A prominent example known to collectors is Superman Supacomic #87, and possibly less known is the variant Bumper Western Comic #1.

But what is the cause of this error? An initial theory was a lack of magenta in the printing. I put it to the Junkyard's resident printing expert, Mark Muller, and this is his take on what happened:

"Magenta is there -look at the halo around Jimmy, and the leotard on Elasti-Lad.

What seems to have occurred is the printer used a warm red instead of 100M and 100Y. This could be so the registration of the plates printed better, especially on shite equipment, or rush jobs.

Scenario 1: Printer had this 'orange' on the deck from another job, and used it for run-ups to get ink balance and registration, or

Scenario 2: (I'm going with this one!) The printer fucked up and had the wrong colour in the deck. they ran quite a few (the registration looks reasonable on your copy) then, instead of scraping the run, changed the 'orange' to Warm Red and continued with the run."

So there you have it - The Secret Origin of the Variant Mighty #122.

For comparison purposes here's pics of the issues side by side: