Boys' Life and the Tripods Trilogy

Recently, a friend of mine sent me (not his fault; I had to know what he was talking about) on a wild Internet goose chase involving a quote wrapped around a Swiss Army knife and someone cutting sardines and onions with it.

I should have known it was a quote from MASH, but in the searching, I discovered this:

If you either squint just right, or better yet download the photo and enlarge it, you can see there are two advertisements in which Google Books found my hot words: Swiss Army knife and MASH. (I like that it's a SWISS ARMY type KNIFE in the advertisement.

This brought back so many memories. It's one of the many, many back pages of a 1984 copy of Boys' Life magazine, which I read religiously as a teenager and Boy Scout. Not that I read much of the front matter. I always went back to the comics and the Gifts and Gimmicks.

But oh, the comics. Searching for an obscure MASH quote brought me to the Boys' Life version of John Christopher's Tripods trilogy, for which I kick myself that I did not keep the magazines because of their serialized comic:

So now late at night, I'm going to be re-reading the comic book series.

Here's a sample: I just have to figure out when the serialization started.