From 1987: A STARLOG MAGAZINE house ad for their spin-off book series.
These had been in print for the best part of a decade and some of them were really starting to show their age at this point (only the SFX books were still an ongoing series) so it looks like the publisher was lumbered with overstocks that they were keen (desperate?) to liquidate.
The first volume of the TV EPISODE GUIDES series (which never reached volume 3) was an early sell out that was never reprinted.
Slow,can you please help ? I have lost all my contacts in a broken device. Besides Starlogged either Ed or yourself recommended an American blog which had good coverage of Marvel UK in it in your comments section, but I cannot find the appropriate post or remember the blog's name ( possibly just ? ?'s blog ).
ReplyDeleteCould you remember what it was?
Cheers,
John.
John,
ReplyDeleteMaybe http://stevegoble.blogspot.co.uk. Lot of stuff there about Spider-Man Weekly, Secret Wars, etc., was referenced in Back Issue magazine. (Also, Steve's my pal!)
And never underestimate lewstringer.blogspot.co.uk for well-researched histories on UK comics.
Hope that helps!
Oops. Second should have also been a link ... http://lewstringer.blogspot.co.uk
DeleteHi Krusty, sorry about the delay, I'm still a few days behind with my emails, yeah, it was indeed Steve Goble!! THANKS a lot for that, mate, I had been googling Glen/Greg Noble, etc. and getting nowhere ( Doh! )
DeleteI know Lew very well, a mate of mine.
Anyway, Steve's back in my bookmarks where he belongs and on with the hunt.....
Thanks again, :-)
John,
DeleteNo problem, glad to help. Steve's from the UK, though his blog also covers a lot of time he's spent in New Zealand.
Re: looking for soundalike names. He was once erroneously called "Stuart Gerville" at his workplace, much to my amusement when he related this to me.
John, I'm not sure which post you are referring to ?
ReplyDeleteA few news items :
Apparently an old favourite of this blog, Captain Britain may soon be starring in his own tv show as you can see here :
http://metro.co.uk/2016/03/28/could-marvel-be-giving-their-first-british-superhero-a-tv-show-5779927/
also, the GREEN ARROW and SUPERGIRL comics from titan seem to have already ended.
Ed,
DeleteI gather that the Captain Britain TV show story is a bit of wishful thinking on the part of an overeager producer making a showreel unasked ...
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2016/03/24/there-is-no-captain-britain-tv-series-after-all-yet/
Although, if an author can twitter-beg his way into writing a trilogy of Star Wars novels, I guess anything's possible.
The CAPTAIN BRITAIN TV SHOW seems to be generating a lot of media attention (I was amazed to find a news story about it in the I newspaper) but there seems to be little substance behind it. I don't know the producer's track record but it seems to be little more than a flight of fancy at this point. I could assemble a pitch document for a DAZZLER TV SHOW this morning with 99.9% certainty thet Marvel would (rightly) ignore it.
ReplyDeleteBad news for the ARROW and SUPERGIRL comics. If true, it just shows that a high profile TV gig still isn't sufficient to shift comics in the UK anymore.
Incidentally, I was surprised at how low the ratings were for the SUPERGIRL/ FLASH crossover show in the States. Despite being on CBS, and increasing its audience by 21%, the special episode still only scored 7 million viewers. In a country the size of the States. And that figure was considered a success. There really has been a quantum shift in the Network business in the digital age. One wonders how the economics stand up... presumably advertisers are now charged more to reach a more fragmented audience.
It was in the times paper where I first read this. Even today, one of their female writers listed what she hoped to see in a cap tv series.
ReplyDeleteDespite telling us that she had no interest in superheroes and mis-spelling his name as Brian Baddock.
It does seem to be the case that good tv ratings don't carry over to high comic sales but the market is now in danger of oversaturation.
As it stands, sky one are now screening a different DC comic based show EVERY night of the week. And they are all good shows but there are only so many hours in any viewer's life.
Still on a comics theme, SCIFI NOW have published the fourth ( and mostly re-hashed ) edition of their SUPERHERO MOVIE COLLECTION. They've had great mileage out of this one.
I've never had much faith in the equation that TV/Film adaptation = more comics readers.
DeleteMainstream superhero comics appeal to a different mindset to a blockbuster movie featuring those characters, primarily superhero comics work as soap opera with ongoing developments where the reader invests in the characters' lives.
An adaptation of a book, by contrast, has a definite beginning, middle and end which generates book sales where the viewer can relive the same story; whereas a film like The Avengers has no equivalent comic to sell, the best a comics company can hope is that people like the characters (which have often been significantly reinterpreted anyway). The exception to that would be Watchmen, which had one complete story to adapt (ignoring the "Before Watchmen" comics material from a couple of years ago which came after the films [but I think those comics have been ignored and forgotten anyway]), and the recent Alias/Jessica Jones TV series.
Marvel has made some steps to make their comics a little more film-audience-friendly in recent years, but mostly in giving characters like Hawkeye and the Scarlet Witch a costume makeover. It seems that DC Comics has been in constant reboot flux for the last decade (soft reboot followed by 2-3 hard reboots from New-52 onwards), so I think the TV people wisely just do their own thing.