Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Be Our Guest Writer: Marvel UK!


Redartz:  Welcome everyone! Today is an auspicious day here at BitBA: our first guest post! And we're in for a real treat: a look at Marvel's UK line, courtesy of Steve Does Comics, Colin Bray and Colin Jones. Many thanks, gentlemen;  the floor is yours!

Steve Does Comics:  For companies founded upon the actions of heroes, Silver Age Marvel and DC were surprisingly timid when it came to foreign lands, preferring to license out their material to local publishers, rather than get directly involved.  In pre-1970s Britain, the reprint rights to Marvel’s tales therefore lay in the hands of Odhams and Alan Class.  Odhams used the material to fill weekly comics like Fantastic, Pow and Terrific, while Alan Class unleashed a plethora of quirky, undated comics mostly destined for sale at bus stations and railway stations to alleviate the boredom of children during lengthy journeys.

Odhams and Alan Class lead the charge to give UK kids US action!

While the Alan Class reprints could still be found loitering around the transport interchanges of Britain until the late 1980s, by 1972, Odhams’ weekly Marvel comics had gone the same way as Loki’s hopes of ever defeating his brother and, deciding there was now a gap in the market, Marvel decided it was time to launch a UK reprint mag of its own.

That mag was The Mighty World of Marvel and, with its tales of life in 1960s America for victims of radiation poisoning, and messages to the reader allegedly from Stan the Man himself, it was not like any other British comic.

But nor was it like an American comic, possessing non-glossy covers and, apart from very early issues, no interior colour. In its infancy, it didn’t even have staples to hold it together, so cheap was its production.


Readers clearly didn’t mind such austerity because, such was its success that, within just nineteen weeks, it spawned its own spin-off - Spider-Man Comics Weekly - which, as well as featuring everyone’s favourite wall-crawler, reprinted the adventures of everyone’s favourite thunder god. For a short spell, Daredevil took the web-spinner’s place in Mighty World of Marvel but can’t have been too popular because, after just weeks, he was dropped to make way for increased Hulk action.


In September 1973, breaking the world record for the greatest number of blurbs ever printed on one cover, The Avengers was launched.



The Avengers was different, not only did it give us the adventures of Marvel’s mightiest team, plus Ditko’s Dr. Strange but it came wrapped inside a fully glossy cover.

Clearly the time had come for Marvel UK to adopt a more American style because, months later, its sister mags were also granted glossy covers.

In the wake of this revolutionary move, Daredevil was once more added to the pages of Mighty World of Marvel, while Iron Man was added to Spider-Man Comics Weekly. Not to be left out, The Avengers also soon gained a third strip as, to cash in on the Kung Fu craze, Shang-Chi was added to the roster although, due to a shortage of reprint material, he soon found himself alternating with Iron Fist.


Clearly there was no stopping Marvel UK now and, flushed with success, in 1974, they launched another two mags, this time simultaneously, which meant that Planet of the Apes and Dracula Lives hit the news stands in the same week as each other.


Early the following year, the company launched The Super-Heroes and Savage Sword of Conan. It’s pretty self-explanatory who the latter of those titles featured. The Super-Heroes, meanwhile, featured the Silver Surfer and the Watcher but, once their stories were used up, it became a place to dump virtually every oddity Marvel had available, and so it gave us the adventures of the Cat, the original X-Men, Giant Man, Doc Savage, the Scarecrow, Bloodstone and just about anyone else who hadn’t been able to sustain a comic of their own in the States.


Marvel UK was now publishing seven titles a week and was starting to look like a genuine challenger to the established UK comics publishers.

But, just as the peak of the Roman Empire proved to be the moment at which it was about to tip over into decline, so it started to become clear that all was not well in Albion. The Savage Sword of Conan proved to be Marvel UK’s first flop, folding after just eighteen issues and merging with The Avengers to provide a magnificently strong comic.

This failure didn’t seem to deter Marvel UK and, later that year, they launched their most audacious venture yet – The Titans.


The Titans was a revelation - a comic printed the wrong way up. Some genius or madman at Marvel had realized that, thanks to the much larger page size of UK comics, if one was turned on its side, two pages of US material could be reprinted on one British page with not too crippling a reduction in print size needed.

Thus it was that we got a comic that featured not three but six strips every issue. The Titans initially gave us The Inhumans, S.H.I.E.L.D., Captain America, Sub-Mariner, and Captain Marvel but its line-up proved to be fluid in the extreme and it seemed at times like any strip could turn up in it at any moment.

The Titans unveiled! Two pages of artwork printed side-by-side on one horizontal page.

It is often claimed this format was unpopular but the fact that, mere months later, Spider-Man Comics Weekly also adopted it suggests it was seen as anything but a failure by the management.

At this point, Marvel UK seemed to have gone mad. They were reliant on reprints but, thanks to the weekly schedule, were often using up material at four times the rate that it had originally been published.  Having two comics featuring six strips a week was only exacerbating that problem, especially as the reformatted Spider-Man comic was ploughing its way though an entire Spider-Man tale every seven days.


But, months earlier, confronted with just this problem, Marvel UK had had a brainwave. Launched not long after its US counterparts, their Planet of the Apes comic had quickly run out of material to reuse. And so it was that their greatest and most magnificent burst of insanity had broken out. They got US Marvel’s Killraven strip and redrew and re-dialogued it in order to pass it off as a Planet of the Apes strip called Apeslayer. Thanks to desperation, the company had created its very first super-hero.

Marvel UK's first hero! Killraven Apeslayer!

In 1976, it created its second super-hero.


That hero was Captain Britain and he was not a triumph. Written and drawn by people with little knowledge of the UK, the strip seemed a strange thing indeed to British readers and failed to catch light. Apart from its somewhat misguided appeal to patriotism, the mag’s main selling point was that it was printed in colour, sacrificing the glossy covers in order to make it financially viable. When this didn’t work, after six months, the colour was dropped and glossy covers were introduced to bring it in line with its sister comics.

Sadly, the move proved futile and, after roughly a year, the mag folded and merged with Spider-Man’s book which had now returned to its original portrait format.

Marvel UK was now well and truly on the ropes. The launch of a British style war comic - Fury - had proven to be a major misstep and it folded after just six months. 



Other titles too were faltering, with The Avengers having merged with Mighty World of Marvel. Dracula Lives merged with Planet of the Apes which later merged with Mighty World of Marvel, not too long before Fury also merged with it. This meant that Mighty World of Marvel was now technically The Mighty World of Marvel with Planet of the Apes and Dracula Lives and The Avengers and Savage Sword of Conan and Fury. Mercifully, this wasn’t the official title. The Titans, meanwhile, had merged with Spider-Man’s title which had already previously merged with The Super-Heroes.

Mergers mergers mergers.

Still, even in this face of this clear decline, Marvel UK carried on launching new titles, giving us The Complete Fantastic Four and also unleashing Rampage starring the Defenders and Nova.


Neither of these titles proved to be successes. The Complete Fantastic Four soon folded, while Rampage took a path that proved far more intriguing. Instead of folding, it went monthly, with a drastically increased page count and a format modelled on the US Marvel black and white mags. In this format, Savage Sword of Conan was also re-launched, this time proving to be far more successful than it had been earlier. By this means, Marvel UK could appeal to a more mature reader and charge a higher cover price.

Marvel UK tries monthly and Conan gets a new lease of life.

But if there was hope in the monthly market, things were increasingly grim on the weekly front, with falling sales and sliding profits. If, as is often claimed, the launch of a Star Wars comic had saved US Marvel, it was increasingly clear that, on the weekly front, it was only Marvel UK’s own Star Wars comic that was staving off financial ruin on the other side of the Atlantic. At one point, Marvel UK was offered for sale to British publishing rivals IPC who saw no value in the brand and spurned the offer.


To solve this problem, in 1978, Dez Skinn was brought in. Skinn had launched an award winning sci-fi mag – Starburst – and also House of Hammer. The success of these projects convinced Stan Lee that Skinn was his British counterpart and thus Skinn was put in charge.

Results were mixed. Skinn decided to revamp the weekly comics to make them feel like British comics, scrapping the glossy covers and cramming an overly ambitious six strips into each mag, meaning that each strip had only four or five pages, making it a disjointed and frustrating read.

The Dez Skinn revolution. Mighty World of Marvel becomes Marvel Comic.

There was also the problem that the vast majority of Marvel’s best material had already been reprinted, meaning the weekly books were increasingly dependent on strips like She-Hulk, Spider-Woman, Miss Marvel, Godzilla and even Ant-Man. For long-term readers, the drop off in quality felt like a terrible betrayal and many lost interest.

The one bright spot amongst this weekly woefulness was that Skinn brought in UK creators to produce material for the venture, with the likes of the Hulk and SHIELD now being drawn and written by Brits. While this was clearly a good thing for the development of local talent, it was a strange thing to read, especially the Hulk strip which was now a baffling compromise between the TV version of the character and the original comic book incarnation.

The monthly mags however flourished and did so to such a degree that, through them, Captain Britain was revived, brought back by Alans Moore and Davis. This strip was arguably Bronze Age Marvel UK’s finest achievement.


Despite its decline, Marvel UK never really went away, spending most of the mid-to-late 1980s producing a seemingly random list of forgettable licensed material. In the early 1990s, they had a revival, taking advantage of the speculator boom and the direct market to launch a bucketful of new titles, including Death’s Head II, Motormouth, Warheads and Killpower which proved popular in America and created the illusion for a while that they were now bigger players than they’d ever been before.

Sadly, financial instability and then the mid-1990s collapse of the US comic book market saw Marvel UK snapped up by Panini who still own the franchise and, amazingly, after all these twists and turns, the company’s 1972 flagship title Mighty World of Marvel is still published to this day, still reprinting old material and still showing no signs of going away.

The comic that refused to die. Mighty World of Marvel, March 2017.

In the end, the 1970s incarnation of Marvel UK was always a doomed venture, the increasing availability of US Marvel comics in Britain made the UK versions increasingly redundant and the weekly schedule gobbling up material had guaranteed it was a project with a limited lifespan but it was fun while it lasted and enabled an entire generation of readers to catch up with almost all of Marvel’s entire history, in just a few short years. For that reason, it’s fondly remembered by those who experienced it.


Colin Jones: I discovered Marvel UK in November 1974 thanks to the Planet Of The Apes TV show which had debuted on British screens just a month earlier and of which I was an instant fan.

Unknown to me Marvel UK's POTA weekly had been launched just six days after the TV show and when I saw #5 on sale, I had to have it.

It wasn't quite what I'd expected, as the apes story had nothing to do with my beloved characters from the TV show but I was hooked anyway and inside the comic there were ads for Marvel UK's other weeklies. It was a whole new world and soon I was reading Spider-Man Comics Weekly and Dracula Lives.

For the next few years I was a devoted fan of Marvel UK, trying every new weekly and I was especially thrilled about the launch of Captain Britain, our own superhero!

But, as Steve says, things went slowly downhill and, in January 1979, there were big changes to the UK weeklies, which I found totally alienating and I started turning to the imported American Marvel comics that were becoming much easier to find.

I continued reading the UK monthlies for a while but, by 1981, I had completely abandoned Marvel UK.

However, it was great fun while it lasted and I am eternally grateful that Marvel UK existed, as I cannot imagine my childhood without Marvel comics.

*

Colin Bray: Thanks for the education Steve!

Bronze Age comics produced by Marvel UK feel both intimately close and strangely distant. As regular BITBA readers may know, it is the sheer ‘American-ness’ of cent copies that holds a special place in my heart. And yet, Marvel UK published comics that were everywhere in the Bronze Age – a little cheaper than the originals, constantly on tap, due to the weekly publishing schedule, and full of letters from *gasp* children like me. The letters even came from places I had visited, such as Uxbridge and Slough!

Picking up UK Marvel back issues since, it’s the distinctiveness that stands out.

ITEM! They look different - as Steve says, for the most part they were published in black and white.


ITEM! They feel different - larger in the hand than the originals, they sometimes bravely ventured into the side-on format or were published as digests.


ITEM! They smell different - presumably due to the cheaper paper stock used this side of the pond.

ITEM! They host occasional competitions – usually parading bland UK-in-the-70s prizes. The exception was Marvel Mastermind of 1976 winner Mark Haynes, who won the original Jack Kirby drawing reproduced further down this page.


ITEM! They include quirky content unique to the UK such as a cut-out-and-keep 1975 calendar.


ITEM! Comic swap pages such as this: “I have: Marvel Annual 1974 (UK), Ghost Rider number 4 (US) and Ka-Zar number 7 (US). I wish to swap these for: 2 US Silver Surfers, US Fantastic Four 148-49, US Iron Man 70, US Defenders 14, US Captain America 180, US Luke Cage 19-20 and 2 US Spider-Man comics.” Good work Paul Dubell of Bolton, Lancashire.


ITEM! Reader’s jokes: “Any fish in this place?” Man behind counter (looking strangely like The Sub-Mariner) “Sorry, Namor in stock.” Name withheld here to protect the guilty.

ITEM! And yet, Marvel UK mimicked just enough of the originals to remain credible. Yes, they did indeed use ITEM!

I now realize UK readers were spoilt during the Bronze Age. With luck we could find a regular supplier of current American issues. And with more luck we had enough pocket money to buy them. But at the same time we had access to the entirety of the Marvel Age of Comics via Marvel UK. And that definitely made its mark on our generation.

Two legends meet!

Three legends meet!

Make your own action scene.

There are three inevitabilities in life. Death, taxes and Stan's Soapbox.

30 comments:

Steve Does Comics said...

Hi, guys. Thanks for publishing our post. I just hope it proves to be of some interest to non-UK readers.

It is a depressing thing with blog posts that you only ever seem to spot your mistakes after publication. So I should acknowledge that, despite my claims, "The Titans," only had five strips in an issue, not six. Like a buffoon, I somehow managed to count Captain America twice when I was trying to work it out.

Also, "The Super-Heroes," didn't initially reprint the Watcher as a back-up strip. It was the original X-Men.

I think those are all the mistakes I made.

It's difficult to capture the impact Marvel UK made on me when it first arrived. I'd only just started reading American comics a few weeks earlier, so to suddenly have access to all this Marvel goodness on a weekly basis was like some sort of miracle come true.

Charlie Horse 47 said...

Steve Does Comics! I am waking up here in Chicago to this masterpiece of a blog you put together! I have been waiting for this since its announcement on Sunday! I'll savor it, throughout the day, like a fine wine at a French meal! Thank you so very much; it must have taken a lot of time to put together. Regards, Charlie

Humanbelly said...

GREAT WORK fellows! A fine and much-appreciated public service you've done here, no kidding!

It's probably a safe bet that the majority of us 'Merican comics aficionados have been, at the very most, just vaguely aware of the Marvel's UK venture. Knew it existed, that it was largely reprint driven forever, on a wildly accelerated schedule, and that Captain Britain came from it. . . sort of. This primer you've provided is the perfect distillation of its history, so's any of us could join in on a conversation about it and not sound like uninformed doofuses. Thank ya kindly!

Man, I can't imagine reading '63's Avengers #1 for the first time as a "new" title in '73! Even at the time those 10 years of development and growth seemed to separate them by whole generations-!

Ha-- I was just gonna skim all of this and run off to work-- and youse guys sucked me right in. Fortunately, I'm my own supervisor/schedule-maker at the moment-!

HB

Anonymous said...

Steve and Colin B have produced a wonderful summary of Marvel UK (Colin, I'd completely forgotten about the 1975 calendar !!). I regret that my own contribution adds no further insight and is merely a brief personal recollection as seen through the eyes of a humble Marvel fan but it was an interesting experience to be part of a post rather than just a commenter. However, there is one fascinating fact that none of us mentioned - from 1975-77 the editor of Marvel UK was Neil Tennant, later of the Pet Shop Boys !! A few years ago Neil Tennant was interviewed on the radio and he was rather snooty and dismissive of his time at Marvel - he was clearly of the opinion that he was just passing the time till something better came along. OK, in his case "something better" turned out to be international pop stardom but come on, Neil, is your huge wealth and worldwide fame really better than your two-year stint as editor of Marvel UK...really ??? (And in the recent topic about cover songs I completely forgot about the Pet Shop Boys' amazing version of "Always On My Mind" which was the third of their four UK #1 hits). I mentioned in the post that by 1980 I had turned to imported Marvel comics - by an amazing coincidence it was on THIS VERY DATE - Saturday, April 5th 1980 - that I started buying American Marvel comics regularly on a month-by-month basis rather than now and again as I'd been doing for the previous 4 years :)

david_b said...

Everyone involved deserves a huge round of applause.. I absolutely LOVE those British covers of our Marvel heroes.., Bronze Starlin cover art always makes me gasp, especially on FF.

Wow and wow.., once my day slows down, will have to review all the exhaustive details presented here further.

Outstanding Job, I'm gobsmacked.

Charlie Horse 47 said...

Steve and Colins! Hail Hail! Great job and I'm barely 20% through! My first question is would an entire US issue be reprinted in a UK weekly or just s few pages. I'm imagining one U.K. Weekly with 2-6 characters would be 40 - 100+ pages thick at 20 pages for a typical US monthly comic.

ColinBray said...

Could I add a shout out for Steve's own blog for all your UK Marvel needs:-

http://stevedoescomics.blogspot.co.uk/?m=1

And a great job Redartz and Steve with the formatting and captions - not a straightforward task!

CH47 - I'm not aware of a single example of a full-issue UK reprint but Steve may say different. A weekly publishing routine made the UK comics more readable in piecemeal format than they otherwise would have been.

Charlie Horse 47 said...

Wow. So in USA we would complain about issues being "continued next month" especially because distribution was so poor. But for U.K. even a single stand-alone issue would spread out over 3-4 weeks??? What was your likelihood of finding the next issue?

Charlie Horse 47 said...

And what would happen with those multi-tie-ins over several different issues and months?

Anonymous said...

Charlie, a Marvel UK comic typically had 36 pages - although it varied from time to time.

This meant it was an easy fit to have a 20 page main story and a 10 page back-up strip, or to print three 10 page stories in one issue. As the original stories were twenty pages long, it made the maths nice and tidy.

After a while, it became standard for Marvel UK comics to feature four strips in an issue. Quite how the maths for that stacked up, I have no idea.

If I remember rightly, "Spider-Man Comics Weekly," and, "The Avengers," initially used the 20 page + 10 page format but then switched to having three 10 page strips a week.

"The Complete Fantastic Four," reprinted an entire 1970s issue of the FF each week, plus a ten page 1960s reprint.

The landscape format of, "The Titans," and, "Super-Spider-Man," meant they could print one 20 page main strip, plus four 10 page strips in each issue.

I think the, "Savage Sword of Conan," and ,"Rampage," weeklies may have used the 20 pages + 10 page format too but I couldn't swear to it.

The rate at which Marvel UK used up material was insane. In 1972, they were reprinting Spider-Man stories from 1962. By 1975, they were reprinting Spidey stories from 1973.

Steve Does Comics said...

PS. Thanks for the plug, Colin. :)

Also, Charlie, I can't speak for other parts of the country but, where I was, it was generally very easy to get issues, apart from a spell in late 1975 to mid 1976 when they suddenly got harder to find for some reason. Happily, after that, they went back to being easy to find again.

Steve Does Comics said...

I should point out that that anonymous comment above was by me. I forgot to add my name to it.

Martinex1 said...

Thank you Steve and Colin and Colin. I appreciate the heavy lifting you are doing this fine Wednesday. Great job all around. And thanks for sharing all of the images.

A few questions for you... I own a few Captain Britain comics and like you said they are printed on a different and larger paper, but what I notice is that the colors are so vibrant and solid. They are unlike the colors in US comics which at the time were somewhat pastel and not always in alignment. Was the coloring in the U.K. Generally better and was it due to the ink, printing technique and/ or the paper? Not sure if you would even know.

Also, in the books I own, the first number of pages are colored, and then the middle pages are black and white and then the final pages are in color again. Was that common? It was a little jarring to go back and forth like that.

And on the UK back issues that I run into once in a while in the States, there are cover blurbs about "Free Mask" or "Free Flying Disk" but I never see those items. Were they in the comics? Or were they separate additions? Curious about that.

Last,, I really liked Captain Britain before Alan Moore. It was surprising to hear that wasn't popular. What was it exactly that fell flat? I actually thought Herb Trimpe's art was some of his best and I think Chris Claremont wrote some issues. I may be wrong about that. But I would love to hear why that original iteration of the hero tanked. His appearance in MTU here was one of my favorites.

Also Colin, great story about Neil Tennant.

Thanks again for sharing. Maybe you would be amicable to doing this again sometime with non Marvel UK characters! It was very enjoyable. Cheers.

Steve Does Comics said...

Martinex, I've not seen an issue of, "Captain Britain," in decades but I seem to remember it had a smoother paper stock than American comics. Less absorbency might have been the reason for the brighter colours. It also smelled a lot stronger, reminiscent of how new LPs smelled when you first pulled them out of the sleeve.

It was highly variable as to how much of a UK comic was in colour. Some had no colour. Some had plenty. I think, "2000 AD," had the middle pages in colour but the rest in black and white. It seemed to be fairly random as to what publishers went with. Apart from, "Captain Britain," Marvel UK weeklies were always in black and white, except the very early days when they had varying amounts of colour. At one point, early on, they were printed in black, white and green, which was a somewhat odd effect.

I think Captain Britain had a number of problems. One was that he was so derivative of Spider-Man, even having his own equivalents of J Jonah Jameson and Flash Thompson.

There was also the problem that his adventures were being created by people who knew nothing of life in Britain, so it never rang true. Characters didn't speak like British people. They spoke like Americans thought British people spoke. There were mistakes like a panel where someone crashed a car into a fire hydrant, which is impossible in Britain because fire hydrants are buried underground. There was a scene when Captain Britain was in a stadium that was clearly an American Football stadium, something that doesn't exist in Britain. There was a scene featuring a motorbike riding highwayman holding up an articulated truck, which was an American, "Duel," style truck, which is nothing like a British style articulated truck. It was a million and one little things like that that added up to make it all feel devoid of authenticity and therefore oddly alienating.

There was also the problem that it was filled with romanticised British cliches like castles, manor houses, knights in armour, lords, sceptres, highwaymen, royalty, Merlin, Stonehenge, etc, that, again, made it clear it was being written by people who were getting their knowledge of Britain entirely from tourist guides. Some of it became plain weird; I think Colin J commented on another blog about a scene where Captain Britain shows up, determined to prevent a villain destroying the British Empire, which in 1970s Britain, was a total head-scratcher.

The free gifts were nearly always in the comic itself. It was rare that you had to send off for them. Generally, the gifts weren't very good. The Spider-Man mask with issue #1 of, "Spider-Man Comics Weekly," has pretty much gained legendary status, as it was just a red paper bag, with two eyeholes cut in it.

Redartz said...

Steve, Colin and Colin- thanks again guys, excellent job! Great introduction to Marvel UK for those of us less familiar with the books. Having never seen one in person until recently, those UK reprints had an air of exotica and mystique ( no, not the mutant). The larger format, the multiple stories, the black/white art, the alternate covers...fascinating stuff.

Say, speaking of the covers- on many of them I can identify the sources for the imagery. But some obviously had newly drawn cover art. Yet I don't see signatures visible. Was there perhaps some policy against cover credit for the artists?

Redartz said...

Oh, and Colin B- thank you, but the formatting credit should go to Steve and you and Colin J. You all made it very easy, only some minor adjustments on my part. Again, great work, all of you!

Steve Does Comics said...

Redartz, I don't have a clue whether there was a policy of stopping artists signing their work on the new covers. Mostly, they did seem to be toiling away anonymously. Fortunately, some of them are easy to spot. Jim Starlin did a string of covers in the early days and his covers are totally distinctive. I think that Ron Wilson and Pablo Marcos were the most prolific Marvel UK cover artists. They seemed to churn them out ten-to-the-dozen.

Mike Wilson said...

Interesting stuff. I remember buying a couple of Marvel reprints when I was visiting relatives in England back in the 80s; I think they were early X-Men reprints, the story where they fight Unus and the Blob. I wasn't really an X-Men fan, but the shop near my Nana's house didn't have any Spider-Man comics, so I took what I could get.

I also remember buying some of those war digest comics (non-Marvel stuff, of course) and having to ask my dad what all the slang meant. To this day, I still remember that "tanner" was slang for sixpence :)

Doug said...

Great post, gang. Really enjoyed the education I received today.

Doug

Martinex1 said...

Thanks again Steve for the details in your follow up. And to each what had been said above, Steve's site is worth multiple visits. Check it out; just click on the link in our sidebar.

A couple additional questions - here in the US through much of the Bronze Age, Spidey and the Hulk were the cornerstone of Marvel's advertising. Those two characters were the merchandising leaders for Marvel. Was that the case in there? It seems like the Hulk came into play much later.

What about characters like Night Raven? We're there other U.K. Creations that built a longer term following?

Did the Black Knight ever get any traction in the U.K. Or was he just another touristy exaggeration?

Martinex1 said...

I apologize for all of the grammatical errors in the above. Auto correct on my phone drives me batty. Horrible.

Steve Does Comics said...

Martinex, at one point, the Black Knight had his own Marvel UK strip. One of the things that Dez Skinn did when he was in charge of Marvel UK was hire local talent to produce material. This meant that the 1979, "Hulk," comic featured Black Knight, Hulk, Night-Raven, SHIELD and even Ant-Man strips all produced by British talent. You can find a lengthy piece about the venture, on Dez Skinn's blog, by clicking this link: http://dezskinn.com/marvel-uk-3/. The British-produced Hulk, Ant-Man and SHIELD strips probably feel as incongruous to American readers as Captain Britain did to British readers.

I think Captain Britain, Betsy (Psylocke) Braddock and Night-Raven were the only Bronze Age Marvel UK creations that had any kind of legs to them (some of us are still praying for the Apeslayer revival). In the late 1980s, the company created Death's Head who I know next to nothing about but he was highly popular on both sides of the Atlantic for a while and, if Wikipedia's to be trusted, appears to still be around in some form.

As in America, Marvel UK seemed to see the Hulk and Spider-Man as their big stars. The Hulk nearly always featured on the cover of, "Mighty World of Marvel," while the FF and Daredevil, who he shared the comic with, could barely get a cover appearance between them.

Anonymous said...

Everything Steve says about Captain Britain and the reasons for the character's failure are probably true but I remained doggedly loyal even after the comic dropped its' colour pages which was a huge disappointment. Spider-Man and the Hulk were definitely the faces of Marvel in the UK - both my parents recognized Spidey and the Hulk but they were clueless about any other Marvel characters.

Charlie Horse 47 said...

Steve, Colin, Colin - This must have been a Herculean effort! I'm digging out my No Prizes to send them your way, if I can find them!

Is there any chance you guys are going to do other UK comics? I suppose you know where I am headed with this question... Fleetway, IPC, D.C. Thomson??? The weeklies, the annuals... It's crazy to think Commandos Weekly has passed it's 5000th issue and Beano should be approaching 4000?

You guys have a rich heritage of comics to be sure! I am hopeful to read more!

ONe last thing - Marti - Red - is there a way to print the blog out on normal pages? Is it something you guys (or I?) can save as normal PDF pages and then print? Sorry for my technical limitations!


Thanks again!

The Prowler said...

Huzzah! Huzzah! One of my favourite blog postings this week!!! Or this Wednesday...

Just a tip, when reading Steve Does Comics postings, try to imagine him wearing a really big hat. Reading posts while pretending the person is wearing a really big hat makes them more enjoyable, entertaining and memorable!!! Or so I've heard...

As all the others have said, looking forward to more Marvel UK Memories!!!

(I used to be a rolling stone
You know if the cause was right
I'd leave to find the answer on the road
I used to be a heart beating for someone
But the times have changed
The less I say the more my work gets done

`Cause I live and breathe this Philadelphia freedom
From the day that I was born I've waved the flag
Philadelphia freedom took me knee-high to a man
Yeah gave me peace of mind my daddy never had

Oh Philadelphia freedom shine on me, I love you
Shine a light through the eyes of the ones left behind
Shine a light shine a light
Shine a light won't you shine a light
Philadelphia freedom I love you, yes I do

If you choose to you can live your life alone
Some people choose the city
Some others choose the good old family home
I like living easy without family ties
Till the whippoorwill of freedom zapped me
Right between the eyes).

PS: Do multi-function robots look down on single purpose automatrons?

Steve Does Comics said...

Charlie, I can't speak for the others but I know almost nothing about the British comics industry, plus it's a huge, huge subject, involving a million and one comics and a zillion and one (often anonymous) creators. I wouldn't even know where to begin with a topic so vast and mysterious to me.

Prowler, I can confirm that I always wear my big hat when I post. I feel it's my duty to the internet.

And thanks to everyone who's praised the post. It's nice to know our efforts weren't wasted. :)

ColinBray said...

Charlie, to echo Steve I share his general ignorance beyond a possible readers knowledge.

But there may be creative ways to explore the content of British comics in a future post should Red and Marti suggest it. Maybe one day...

Humanbelly said...

Oo, and I do love the montage of earnest writers in the "Guest Writer" logo, btw!

HB

Charlie Horse 47 said...

Colin B, there is no way on God's green earth this would be wasted! Heck , I want to print it! My only thoughts are that it could have been two or three blogs! It's so rich in detail I will be reread ing it!

Kid said...

If you'll forgive me hijacking someone else's platform, there are cover galleries of Mighty World of Marvel, Spider-Man Comics Weekly, The Super-Heroes, Savage Sword of Conan, and many more British Marvel (and non-Marvel) comics on my humble blog called Crivens Comics & Stuff, which can be found at http://kidr77.blogspot.com

Feel free to take a look.

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