It is safe to say that September/ October '84 was a big month for Marvel readers in the UK... the launch of the new CAPTAIN BRITAIN monthly, these two new arrivals, the end of MWOM (see the previous post) and the reboot of SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN as a (partial) colour monthly with a movie adaptation and the post-CB leftovers from the MIGHTY WORLD...
The pain of going Back To School was also reduced by the sport of hunting the various bookshops and newsagents (and even Boots as I recall) to spot that year's must-have annuals.
speaking of hunting for stuff in newsagents, I'm finding it very hard to locate a copy of the new uk transformers comic.
ReplyDeleteIt sold out instantly in my local shop and nowhere else seems to have it. Bah.
Btw, the latest TF part-work has material on TF-uk from the 80's.
The latest edition of the TRANSFORMERS partwork is a bit of a must-have for anyone who was reading the British fortnightly at the time it launched. It collects the four-part US limited series as well as the run of UK-created stories that followed. It also has some background information which was - to be at least - previously unknown. I wonder how well the British edition would have fared if they had launched with 'The Man of Iron' as the first strip published...
ReplyDeleteThere's also some nice examples of behind-the-scenes documents, unused art and the original end of the US limited series... which didn't look to be the same as the made-in-the-UK version that appeared in the second volume of THE COMPLETE WORKS a few years later.
I've been skipping the modern era (IE post 2000) editions and just cherry-picking the ones from the original run. The new 'Marvel red book' is also perfectly times... it reprints the early ALPHA FLIGHT strips which means - in one trip to the till - you can recreate the best of mid-1980s Marvel UK when TF and Alpha Flight (in the pages of SECRET WARS) were alternating weeks in the newsagents.