1984: ENTERPRISE INCIDENTS SPECIAL COLLECTORS EDITION Issue 4 (NMP)

From July 1984: ENTERPRISE INCIDENTS SPECIAL COLLECTORS EDITION number four, reprinting the sixth issue of the original run. 

1975: MARVEL UK CHECKLIST

 

From May 1975: That week's Mighty Marvel current attractions, courtesy of the British Bullpen.  

This rundown appeared in THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN weekly issue 9, dated 3 May. 

1989: FANTASY ZONE Launch Ad (Marvel UK)

From 1989: The pre-launch House Ad for MARVEL UK's ambitious, but ultimately doomed, genre magazine FANTASY ZONE. 

It ran for six issues. 

1992: RED DRAWF SMEGAZINE and SUPERMAN House Ads (Fleetway Editions)

From 1992: A page of Fleetway Editions (the amalgamation of Fleetway, nee IPC Youth Group, and London Editions... a combination akin to two drunks proping each other up as the market collapsed around them) House Ads touting the licensed RED DRAWF SMEGAZINE and the bi-monthly (this was clearly a title that FE were struggling to keep viable) SUPERMAN reprint comic.

The latter takes this week's award for "That'll do!" design. 

1988: AMAZING HEROES issue 137: FLASH GORDON SPECIAL (Fantagraphics)

From March 1988: An excellent FLASH GORDON themed edition of AMAZING HEROES.  

It's always worth grabbing a copy of AH if you stumble across it in the back issue bins (especially if it's the 50p box) because, whatever the issue, you're sure of a blast of nostalgia and some fascinating Star Age reading.  Later issues featured Andy Mangel's excellent Hollywood Heroes column which also appeared in the UK's FANTAZIA.  

This issue is a particularly good one: devoted to FLASH GORDON in all its forms.

The definitive Flash book has yet to be written (imagine a glorious coffee table jobbie packed full of amazing art, never before seen production design from the movie, artwork from the various animated incarnations and one still, with a sarcastic caption, from the rocketship crash of a TV series) but, in the meantime, this is probably as close as we'll get. 

AH which, amazingly, used to appear fortnightly and spin-off must-have look-ahead Preview Specials, continued into the early nineties before being squeezed out by the more glossy, bust less demanding, WIZARD and its wannabes.  COMICS INTERVIEW, which I always considered a companion piece to AH, went the same way. 

1978: STARBURST Issue 2

From March 1978: STARBURST issue 2.

Continuing the SPACE CRUISER theme from yesterday (scroll back a couple of posts...), here's the same artwork re-purposed for the cover of the not-yet-a-Marvel-mag second issue of Britain's answer to STARLOG.  

You can find this month's issue (yep, after a hiatus, it's still going) in WH SMITH right now... although, some branches seem to insist on putting it behind the till (London's Oxford Street branch are particularly dopey on this front... they put the behind-the-counter shelves at floor height to further reduce the chances of anyone seeing them) on the spurious grounds of "people nick them".  I'm not sure why the chain has concluded some mags are infinitely more nickable than others but I don't work in loss prevention... or store design. 

1983: THE MAKING OF RETURN OF THE JEDI (Ballentine)

 

From 1983: THE MAKING OF RETURN OF THE JEDI.

As the book market has contracted, publishers seem to have tried to counter falling sales by making film/ TV tie-in books premium products: hefty, slipcase laden affairs packed full of photos, production art and the like.  You can see the logic: sell less overall but make more money on each copy sold.  The Marvel movies and TV show have certainly led the way in this area.

Look back to 1983 and ROTJ: this excellent (but, apparently, hard to find... this is the only copy I have ever seen) behind-the-scenes tome was just a bog-standard paperback.  Nothing fancy, not terribly pricy and packed with oodles of information (presented, like the modern Making Of... Star Wars whoppers, in a production diary fashion). 

The more high-end visual stuff did continue to appear of course... the market was robust enough to support several different Art Of... type books (the large colour tomes and the smaller black & white sketchbooks) and, of course, several tie-in magazines with more stills and behind-the-scenes coverage. 

1978: SPACE CRUISER (Space Battleship Yamato) Poster Art

From 1978: poster art for SPACE CRUISER, the theatrical release (making the most of the post-STAR WARS hullabaloo for all things space) of Japanese animated show SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO.  

The movie spliced together material from the TV show, bridged with some new material.  It was released in Japan the previous August and rolled-out internationally the following year.

This appeared in STARBURST magazine to accompany a feature on the movie.  I have no recollection of the film getting a UK theatrical release.  Possibly only on a very small number of screens...?  

1994: NOT OF THIS EARTH SPECIAL EDITION Issue 1

From 1994: the first NOT OF THIS EARTH (NOTE) SPECIAL EDITION.

NOTE, published by an outfit called Image (not to be confused with the comic book publisher busy booming around this time), debuted a year-or-two earlier as a standard black & white magazine.  I have the issue devoted to BATTLESTAR GALACTICA somewhere safe.

For whatever reason, the publisher decided to ditch the standard mag format in favor of a new squarebound magazine-sized book format with black & white interiors.  Maybe they thought it would stand-out against the competition although I suspect it probably just confused punters and stockists. 

They also adopted the flip-book format, hence the double-cover above.  

STAR WARS, enjoying its early 1990s resurgence of interest, was a no-brainer whilst Shatner's TEKWAR was a flavor-of-the-moment multimedia (books, comics, TV movies and a one-season TV series) assault which, despite the star power, never quite became the long-running franchise Shatner clearly hoped for. 

If my memory is correct, three magazine-format issues of NOTE appeared (with covers devoted to DS9, Lois and Clark and Battlestar respectively) prior to this relaunch.  One further 'issue' followed this one, another flip-cover book with The X-Files and the short-lived Nowhere Man. 

1979: THE BLACK HOLE Movie Novelization

 

From 1979: THE BLACK HOLE movie novelization.

There were certain books that were essential items in any Star Warrior's library during the peak of the Star Age... and this was one of them.  

The ubiquitous Alan Dean Foster supplied the words and the deal was sweetened by the obligatory insertion of a selection of colour stills in the middle. 

The publisher was clearly so confident that this one would fly off the shelves with minimal effort that they didn't even bother with the usual back cover blurb.