This was an underwhelming I-wonder-why-they-bothered last hurrah which seems to have been published simply to set up the merger with - of all things - THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN THE BARBARIAN the following month.
MWOM had suffered from a weak start (thanks to an all-reprint line-up and colour printing so poor the strips were a chore to read) but had settled down nicely after the merger of DAREDEVILS to become a best-of-both-worlds mix of US reprints (hard-to-find in the UK limited series), original UK strips (notably Captain Britain) and features (including fanzine reviews and the Night Raven text stories).
Unfortunately the British Bullpen seemed to have lost faith (or interest) once the CB strip shifted across to headline his own anthology book and this issue has more than a whiff of if-we-must.
The page count is reduced and there is no interior colour... and yet the cover price remained the same. Sneaky. Kicking of the four-part Magik reprint (an X-verse strip with fantastic elements well suited to... you get the idea...) looks purely like a way to tempt some of the MWOM readership to sample Conan for the first time. You can't imagine the overlap in audience was massive... and it is hard to imagine the SSOCTB readership being too impressed with having the mainstream Marvel universe suddenly imposed on them. Maybe colour interior pages and the start of the CONAN THE DESTROYER movie adaptation softened the blow. At least for a few months. Savage Sword was cancelled within the year.
I'd speculate that someone at Marvel UK thought "Magik has a sword, and that's also what Conan readers like!" so figured they'd snag both markets. But perhaps I'm overestimating the thought that went into a lot of these cancellation/folding-into-another title plans.
ReplyDeleteWhat's missing here is that trusty "Great news for all readers inside!" banner that heralded cancellation!
And I'll bet that reversed S on the cover ("Right foot backwardS") was a far more complex operation than we'd credit in this modern age of desktop publishing. Is it just me or is it not quite lined up?