Thursday 14 May 2015

1986: MARVEL UK TREASURY EDITIONS/ COMPLETE WORKS House Ad.


From May 1986: A MARVEL UK House Ad for the first three releases in the hardback TREASURY EDITION (not to be confused with the oversize tabloids of the past) line.

These were sold in book stores/ departments rather than alongside the regular comics so, despite heavy plugging in the core line, were easily overlooked.

The two younger-reader entries, THE CARE BEARS and THE GET ALONG GANG, recycled material from the respective weeklies.

THE TRANSFORMERS: THE COMPLETE WORKS (something of a misnomer as it only reprinted the first two issues of the initial US limited series) is the one most likely to resurface today.  It recycled the specially-commissioned cover art from the first UK issue, based on the toys rather than the more commonly used animation model sheets from Marvel Productions (they reached New York after the first issue of the limited series was already completed... and took far longer to reach Redan Place).  

The contents would already have been familiar to anyone who'd read the first four issues of the fortnightly or the first (summer 1985) Collected Comics edition.  The latter, and this hardback, had the advantage of presenting the material in colour (the fortnightly, after the first issue, was a mix of colour and black & white interior pages) and with the pages in the intended order.  The British Bullpen sliced the meet-the-Autobot-team double-page spread (an invaluable reference tool) out of the main strip and made it the centre-page poster in the second issue.  

A second edition of THE TRANSFORMERS followed... but we'll get to that.

As well as being Marvel weeklies, all three had something else in common... their animated counterparts were all part of TV-am's early morning schedules. 

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