Amiga Joker

Amiga Joker was a German Amiga magazine published by Joker Verlag of Untere Parkstraße 67, Haar, outside Munich. This library holds 78 issues, April 1990 to October 1996.

It is the first German entry in this Vault, which had eight entries on British Amiga magazines and none on a German one — for a machine that sold heavily in Germany.

A schedule, and a way to check it

Magazine entries usually take a publishing schedule on trust, because the only witness is the magazine saying what it intends. Here both halves are present.

The April 1990 Impressum states it exactly:

“AMIGA JOKER erscheint monatlich, zum jeweils letzten Freitag des Vormonats. Doppelausgaben: 6/7 und 8/9.”

Monthly, on the last Friday of the preceding month, with June/July and August/September combined — so ten issues a year, which is what the subscription line charges for: Jahrespreis (10 Ausgaben): DM 60,-.

The holdings then say whether that is what happened. The cover months held for 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1995 are identical in all four years:

01 02 03 04 05 06 08 10 11 12

Ten issues, July and September missing, exactly as a 6/7 and 8/9 double-issue scheme produces. Four consecutive years matching a stated schedule month for month is about as close as this library gets to confirming a publishing pattern rather than repeating one.

⚠ The two earliest years do not fit, and it is not safe to say why. 1990 and 1991 hold different month sets, and an absent month in this library may mean an issue was never published or merely that it is not held. The four matching years are evidence; the two that differ are not evidence of a change.

The market was a language, not a country

The Impressum names Verlagsunion of Wiesbaden as distributor “für Inland (Groß-, Einzel- und Bahnhofsbuchhandel), Österreich, Schweiz” — for Germany through wholesale, retail and station bookshops, plus Austria and Switzerland.

Which is a useful correction to the territory suffix this library files it under. Amiga Joker was sold into the German-speaking market across three countries, and its subscription price is quoted twice, DM 60 at home and DM 72 abroad. A magazine’s territory and its language are not the same boundary, and in this case the language is the larger one.

Readers on the page

The issue held here carries an appeal that places the magazine near the demoscene rather than merely reporting on it. The editor announces that a Galerie page will alternate with the magazine’s established Girl page, and asks readers to send work in:

“Was immer Euch einfällt, seien es Demos, Gedichte, Zeichnungen oder andere Wunder der schönen Künste.”

Whatever occurs to you — demos, poems, drawings. Reader-submitted demos treated as gallery material alongside poetry and drawing is a different editorial posture from the British Amiga press of the same year, which mostly covered the scene from outside.

⚠ That is one issue’s editorial, not a description of six years. This library holds Amiga Joker in quantity and no secondary account of it, so nothing here describes how it reviewed, what it scored, or how German readers regarded it.

See also

• Commodore Amiga
• CU Amiga, Amiga Format, Amiga Computing, Amiga Power, Amiga Action — the British titles of the same years
• Pixel, MC-microcomputer — the other non-Anglophone entries here