I see, that answers my question Jim_Campbell – nowadays they do a bumper Christmas prog with normal numbering. So the year confusion only applies to a handful of issues. Fair enough. Thanks for explaining.
Perhaps "weird" was the wrong word for me to use. What I meant was that it looks like a tacit admission by those in charge that the comic would likely never reach Prog 2000. Which, as you say, was not an unreasonable prediction at the time, but seems (especially in retrospect) a sadly pessimistic stance for the comic itself to implicitly endorse. Kind of shows you how rocky things were.
Perhaps "weird" was the wrong word for me to use. What I meant was that it looks like a tacit admission by those in charge that the comic would likely never reach Prog 2000. Which, as you say, was not an unreasonable prediction at the time, but seems (especially in retrospect) a sadly pessimistic stance for the comic itself to implicitly endorse. Kind of shows you how rocky things were.