Editor and writer Paul Kupperberg is now working with Graphic Imaging Technology (GIT), and their current big project is Weekly World News: The Complete Archive. GIT has previously published complete digital collections of such classic publications as MAD Magazine, National Lampoon, and Marvel Comics titles such as Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Iron Man, and X-Men. As with those previous projects, their plan is to collect every single issue of the classic tabloid—dating back to its inception in 1979 and running through its final issue from the summer of 2007—on one DVD.
Now Kupperberg is looking for help, writing “Readers everywhere turned to the Weekly World News first for breaking news from around, beneath, and beyond the world. And now Weekly World News turns to you, its readers and fans, to make this DVD collection possible. GIT is missing copies of WWN for scanning. Were they eaten by Bat Boy?Stolen by aliens? Lost in the October 2001 anthrax scare at the paper’s former corporate headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida?
“Whatever the reason, GIT needs to borrow copies of select issues.” They’ll pay for “fully-insured shipping to and from your collection and return them to you in the exact condition they left your hands, usually (depending on the number of issues involved) within 72 hours. You’ll also receive GIT’s grateful acknowledgement on the packaging and two (2) free copies of the published disk.”
The issues they’re missing are:
1979 (all issues)
1980 (all issues)
1981 (issues #4, 16, 17, 19)
1982 (all issues)
1983 (all issues)
1984 (all issues)
1985 (issues #1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 19-33, 42, 44-47, 49, 52)
1990 (issue #34)
1991 (issues #1, 24, 27, 29, 30, 32)
2000 (issues #2-8, 10, 41, 45, 48, 49, 52)
2001 (issues #1, 2, 8, 9, 12, 13, 17, 22, 23, 35-39, 42, 43, 49)
Readers who may be able to help them fill some of the holes are urged to email them, at wwnneedsissues at optonline dot net.
“Within the pages of WWN appeared some of the most unbelievable stories in history. Before The Onion, before The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, Weekly World News was the one and only—and funniest—purveyor of fake news in the country, The World’s Only Reliable Newspaper, and a cultural icon that first brought you the story of Bat Boy, kept you updated on the whereabouts of Bigfoot, and broke the news of Elvis sightings in truck-stops throughout this great land of ours!
“Weekly World News is a pop culture icon, having been featured in such films as Men In Black (where Tommy Lee Jones’s character K calls the paper the ‘best damn investigative reporting on the planet’ because ‘every story in this paper is true.’), So I Married an Axe Murderer, The Naked Gun 2: The Smell of Fear, Repo Man, and Twelve Monkeys. It has played a starring role in episodes of The WB’s hit series Supernatural. During the 1992 US Presidential campaign, both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were photographed reading the WWN report on their meeting with the alien P’Lod, leading Clinton to quip it proved his campaign had ‘universal appeal.'”
SFScope first broke the news of the publication’s then-impending demise in July 2007, and followed up with more details in this article.