1993: SHADOW RIDERS House Ad (Marvel UK)

 

This House Ad for SHADOW RIDERS (a four-issue MARVEL UK mini from 1993) perfectly sums up M-UK's marketing strategy during the Genesis Explosion:  

1. Cover-enhancements galore.  To attract attention on crowded shop shelves, and generate some speculator buzz (all those oodles of perceived extra value), every new launch had to be somehow augmented to shift more copies.  This was deemed particularly desirable if it allowed the publisher to crank-up the cover price sufficiently to raise the profit margins compared with a standard-format copy.  

2.  M-UK did love those circulation-tweaking guest appearances by hot Marvel stars from across the pond.  Cable and Ghost Rider were shipping a lot of copies of their own books (and any others that Marvel New York parachuted them into) so it made sense for the British Bullpen to purloin them as well.  Except, funnily enough, any characters from the States who turned-up in the UK-verse seemed to suffer collective amnesia (very much the same ailment that struck anyone who interacted with the ULTRAVERSE characters post-merger) and never spoke of their adventures again.  

3.  There's no mention of the creative team attached to the book.  By the end of the year, M-UK's marketing would change track and start putting far greater emphasis on the "hot" (to use the WIZARD MAGAZINE parlance) teams working on their books.  For the record, this was from Freeman, Prentice, Dearsley, Peters and editor Stuart Bartlett.