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It probably just means that the article will be in the Feb 1 issue.

Skewed dates might be more accurate, but they'd also be more confusing in a lot of use cases than simply using the print date everywhere.

If I remember my 2000AD days right, I think the date was when the newsagent should remove the comic from the shelves, more like a sell-by date than a published-on time.

Correct. I raise my LRD to you, Sir.

Yeah, print magazines have a kind of chronological arms race. No one wants to have a date that's earlier than the adjacent magazines on the stand.

Well, along with cars, and sports video games, and basically anything else with some chronologically oriented release cycle. Really the only things to buck this trend were Microsoft operating systems in the 90s.