1984: THE FIRST A-TEAM STRIP in LOOK-IN

From October 1984: THE A-TEAM arrive, in comics form, in LOOK-IN.

This wasn't the first outing of the iconic-yet-underrated action show in British comics.  Cannell's guns for hire had already been appearing in TV COMIC, the moribund long-runner that had shown some belated signs of life in the Eighties by running original strips based on THE DUKES OF HAZZARD, BATTLE OF THE PLANETS, TALES OF THE GOLD MONKEY and - ahem MISTER MERLIN.

Signing the A-listers hadn't been enough to keep the weekly in business and LOOK-IN were quick to swoop once the property came into play.  It really was a logical team-up and it must have annoyed and frustrated ITV Publications that - somehow - Universal had licensed it to someone else first.

However, adapting the show was not without some hassles.  Despite ruling the early Saturday night schedules (sorry Colin Baker), editors were worried that the random gun play (and cigars) might attract the attention of parents when translated to the printed page.  So firearms and tobacco were strictly controlled, no doubt to the frustration of the writers.

Universal's fast-and-loose licensing struck agaion the following summer when MARVEL UK published the first of two TAT specials, recycling the three-issue mini-series rushed into print in the States.  Someone had obviously spotted that LOOK-IN had securred the rights to publish a weekly strip... but not all comics rights.  It's telling that Marvel were never tempted to rerun the reprints, in serial form, in any of their late-eighties anthologies (THE INCREDIBLE HULK PRESENTS or MARVEL BUMPER COMIC) when the show was still bouncing around the ITV schedules.

I've posted about those Marvel specials, and the US limited series that spawned them, in posts-long-past.  Follow the link below to see my A-Team musings to date.

1984: TRANSFORMERS/ INDIANA JONES MARVEL UK HOUSE AD

From October 1984: two new launches from MARVEL UK: The soon-to-be-very-successful THE TRANSFORMERS and the cancelled-within-the-year INDIANA JONES MONTHLY.

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.

1984: LAST ISSUE ALERT: THE MIGHTY WORLD OF MARVEL (SECOND SERIES) ISSUE 17

From October 1984: the finale of the second (not to be confused with any of the Panini-era reboots) run of THE MIGHTY WORLD OF MARVEL, published - of course - by MARVEL UK.

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.

1984: ON SALE THIS WEEK: EAGLE

Onsale this week way back in 1984: EAGLE.

I thought it would be fun to take a little more time and look at all the strips that appeared in the copy of EAGLE that went on sale on this date way back in 1984.

For copyright reasons I've only included the first page (or pages in the case of Dan Dare) of each story... just enough to bring the memories flooding back.  I hope.

The Happy Families done-in-one-pager is a little grim... and a little unusual.  It's the sort of thing you probably wouldn't get in a kids comic today without a flurry of compaints from parents, a social media storm and someone turning-up in the paper complaining of "traumatized' kids and demanding some compo from the publisher.  It seems better suited to SCREAM!, which was still just about in business at this point.

1984: EAGLE DOOMLORD CROSSWORD PUZZLE

From 1984: Something for the weekend (or the long commute): a page-filling DOOMLORD CROSSWORD, possibly concocted by the IPC Puzzles Department, from the pages of EAGLE.

Enjoy.

1984: BARON IRONBLOOD BATTLE ACTION FORCE HOUSE AD

From 1984: It looks like - judging from the illustrations in the new issue of the Diamond PREVIEWS door-stopper - that a certain BARON IRONBLOOD is about to be introduced to the new IDW/ Hasbro shared universe.  Which - if I'm reading the runes correctly - would make me want to snap up a copy in a round three months time.  They've given him a makeover so he looks a little less like Ned Kelly.  I can't imagine why...

In the meantime, here is a bit of vintage Baron Booby Buckethead in an IPC House Ad for another buy-it-for-the-next-month retention ruse: a Baron Ironblood poster hogging one of the colour pages of BATTLE ACTION FORCE.

Good luck making the four parts line-up!

1984: BIG K MAGAZINE IPC LAUNCH AD

From 1984: Anyone remember IPC's first-generation computer magazine BIG K?

It got a fair amount of plugs in the Youth Group weeklies, presumably because it was being pitched at a similar crowd (and had Richard Burton as Assistant Editor).  Things didn't go quite as planned, despite aiming at as many platforms as possible (Spectrum, BBC, CBM 64, Vic, Electron and - err - Oric) and a Strontium Dog cover on issue 8, and the 12th issue turned out to be the last.

This March '84 IPC House Ad is for the first issue... with a winning retro freebie that actually would have been a pretty big deal back in the day.

1984: THE WHOOPEE NAUGHTY BOOKLET HOUSE AD

From March 1984: Yet another cut-and-keep (buying) booklet promo from IPC.  This time it's the parent-baiting 'Naughty Booklet' published in WHOOPEE.

This one was intended to encourage readers to stick around for four weeks.  By which time the Circulation Department must have assumed there was a good chance they would become regular readers without even noticing...

1984: EAGLE HOLIDAY SPECIAL HOUSE AD

From April 1984: an IPC House Ad for the second EAGLE HOLIDAY SPECIAL.

On sale now... way back when...

One of the joys with getting every new copy of a regular comic was flicking through the pages to see what other stuff you could go out and get.  Holiday Specials (restricted to one a year at King's Reach Tower but published 2-4 a year over at the British Bullpen) were always a good excuse to hunt the shelves of various local newsagents until a copy could be tracked down.  Or sometimes they'd hit BEFORE the first sightings of the adverts. Always a pleasent surprise... unless you had to dash home to get (beg!) more pocket money and then dash back to the shop... all the time hoping no-one else had spotted and snagged it.

How many of you used to tuck must-have purchases behind something less enticing until you could broker a deal to secure the cash?

1984: MARVEL UK'S RETURN OF THE JEDI WEEKLY CELEBRATES 50 ISSUES

From May 1984: MARVEL UK's RETURN OF THE JEDI weekly celebrates fifty issues (and almost a year in print) with a blue elephant and a free glossy booklet, C.Y.R.I.L's DATA FILE, full of photos and saga-related facts.

And - oh look - they've reused the ROTJ US Superspecial cover art yet again.

Despite being the magazine's 'Editor Droid', C.Y.R.I.L had yet to make his visual debut in the comic... that was still a few more months away.  The 'character' himself first appeared, as a letters page gimmick, back in the days of STAR WARS WEEKLY in the late Seventies.

ROTJ weekly itself was still in its first phase of mixing new (chopped into very short chapters) and vintage (sometimes with some weird paginantion) Marvel Star Wars strips (sadly nothing new was ever commissioned for this run) along with vaguely related movie adaptations as the third feature (at this point: JAMES BOND: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. Next up: KRULL).

The British Bullpen had only just got around to clearing the backlog of pre-JEDI US material (a reversal of the one-time situation where the US colour monthly was reprinting strips already published in the British edition) and was now - finally - relating events after the fall of the Empire.  The cherry-picked SWW era reprints were about to give way to another outing of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK adaptation the following week, the first time the strip had seen print in the UK since 1980.

ROTJ eventually ran for 155 issues (plus specials) before succumbing to falling sales and the decline in the saga's popularity.  The strip ended its days as a back-up feature in SPIDER-MAN AND ZOIDS before fading away (although the spin-off DROIDS and EWOKS strips, based on the animated shows, continued to appear across the British range).

1984: THE 'V' STORYBOOK

From 1984: The 'V' STORYBOOK, published in the UK.

This is a softcover storybook which I found recently, completely by chance, stuffed into a dealer's box. I snapped it up. Of course.

Publishing informatiin is frustratingly sparse but it appears to be from the same outfit that also packaged and published the hardback 'V' STORYBOOK, sold only through the BHS retail chain, and the one-and-only UK annual.

What I find most interesting about this is how well illustrates how Warner Brothers and NBC were actively trying to reposition the show for a much broader (read: younger) audience.

The two mini-series had very clearly, on both sides of the Atlantic, been pitched and produced as adult shows. Both contained scenes of (mild) terror that - although tame now - were pretty much at the edge of what TV Standards & Practices would allow on broadcast TV at the time. And they delivered some of the most memorable small screen genre moments of the decade. 

But network and studio clearly concluded that the weekly series - a bad idea from the start - could broaden its reach by quietly dumping or reinterpreting some of the more adult elements of the mini-series in favour of a mix of SF, very mild scares (what will Diana eat this week?), largely consequence-free (unless the cast needed to be trimmed) violence and - increasingly (because talking heads are cheap to shoot) campy soap opera theatrics. 

This partly reflected the show's new Friday @ 8pm timeslot (a bit of scheduling which saw the third episode, Breakout, initially 'banned' by NBC as it was deemed unsuitable for the hour) and also reflected the studios plans to shift as much merchandise as possible. 

The 1984 debut was accompanied by a tsunami of stuff, much of it pitched at a younger buyer: comics, toys (although plans for a range of figures and vehicles never went into production once it became clear that the show was unlikely to make it into a second season), lunch boxes and trading cards all hit US stores.

Warner Brothers planned to repeat the same trick in the UK but were hampered by ITV's decision to keep the show out of primetime (I don't think any of the regional companies aired it in evening peak) and confine it to late evening slots. This was partly because the programme buyers had believed they were snapping up a continuation-in-tone of the mini-series that had delivered such good numbers for the network (10 million plus, despite a late start and strong competition from the BBC's Olympic coverage) rather than a perspective replacement for THE A-TEAM.

The strategy failed and NBC were forced to shuffle the show back an hour where it was exposed to strong competition from the other nets. The show shuttered after only 19 episodes (talk of a 20th being on the verge of going into production seems like little more than writers collecting a final paycheque and the studio half-heartedly trying to demonstrate how the show could be retooled to stay in business) and - despite early talk of another mini-series or TVM to wrap up the cliffhanger and reboot the failed franchise - interest waned fast and merchandising ended (the DC Comic shuttered after only 18 months... The more adult novels continued longer).

Below is a sample page from inside the book. 

1984: SHEENA MOVIE ADAPTATION (MARVEL COMICS)

From December 1984 and February 1985 (which makes me suspect that the first issue shipped later than planned... presumably to align with the film's release dates): Marvel's two-issue mini-series adaptation of SHEENA, starring ex-Angel Tanya Roberts as the Queen of the Jungle.

Based on the 1930s newspaper strip character, the return to comics marked a return to old territory for the character. Unfortunately the film was a spectacular non-starter (even at the Golden Raspberry Awards where it snagged five nominations but no awards) and vanished back into the shrubbery.

The Marvel adaptation also appeared, in magazine format, as MARVEL SUPER SPECIAL 34. There was no UK outing from the British Bullpen.

1984: GHOSTBUSTERS IN STARBURST MAGAZINE (MARVEL UK)

From December 1984: STARBURST, from Marvel UK, covers the making of the original GHOSTBUSTERS movie in a special issue of the title's regular run. Marvel even threw in (literally, it was loosely inserted in the magazine and easily lost) a free GB logo sticker (did they get a license for that?).

I saw the new GB movie at the weekend and I have to say I thought it was jolly good. It certainly surpassed my expectations. Even if, I times, I thought I was watching history's most expensive FRENCH AND SAUNDERS sketch.

Forget about the hopeless trailer (which made it look like a beat-for-beat rehash of the first flick) and go with an open mind. I'm pretty confident you will enjoy it. There is already talk of the inevitable sequel. I hope it's better than the original sequel.

This issue inadvertently started a long and prosperous relationship between the British Bullpen and the franchise. THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS animated series became a cash machine for the Annex Of Ideas, spreading out from their own title to numerous annuals, specials, spin-offs, a SLIMER solo title, a strip in comedy horror weekly IT'S WICKED and a residency in the anthology MARVEL BUMPER COMIC.

1984: TIGER FORMAT CHANGE (IPC)

From March and April 1984: what a difference a week makes! The last old format (akin to the 1982-83 relaunch of EAGLE, or STARLORD from the previous decade) edition of IPC sports weekly TIGER and the first of the newsprint format already adopted by the bulk of the publisher's other weeklies.

This was another nail in the venerable weekly's coffin and a sure sign that sales (and therefore budgets) were seriously on the slide. Adopting what format across the range almost certainly simplified production and print contracts as well.

Tiger had launched back in 1954 and, from the start, had a heavy emphasis on sport. The changeover to a cheaper format (significantly not reflected in an amended cover price (IPC pulled the same trick with Eagle) happened exactly one year before the title folded into the pages of (surprise surprise) Eagle after 1,555 editions.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, little editorial hoopla was generated by the switch and the emphasis was placed squarely on the number of strips crammed into each issue.

1984: INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM ANNUAL (MARVEL UK)

From 1984: Britain's INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM ANNUAL, reprinting the US comics adaptation and published by Marvel UK and Grandreams.

There was no getting away from this one: in addition to this annual, Marvel London also serialized the strip in the pages of SPIDER-MAN weekly... the first time that they had put a movie strip into the long-runner. I think it also appeared quite a long time before the movie itself opened here in Britain in an age where spoilers were no big deal.

Coinciding with the release of the film itself, Redan Place rolled out an Indiana Jones monthly (see posts past) which kicked off with THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF... reprints (previously seen in the STAR WARS monthly) and, sure enough, the TEMPLE OF DOOM adaptation again. This unfortunate bit of planning meant that all the strip contents in the "new" mag were actually reprints of recent reprints. This may explain why it only ran for 11 issues and a special before becoming the final title to fold into Spider-man (at that point the juvenile THE SPIDER-MAN COMIC) during its last months.

The colouring on the cover, recycled from the US magazine edition, makes it look like Doctor Jones is wearing lippy. 

1984: CONAN THE DESTROYER ANNUAL (MARVEL UK)

From 1984: the MARVEL UK edition of the CONAN THE DESTROYER movie adaptation, published as an annual by MARVEL UK.

The strip was also serialized across several months of THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN THE BARBARIAN magazine, beginning with the MWOM merger issue. However, despite the introduction of a few colour pages much of the strip was still published in black & white. Herein was the only UK outlet in colour.

Quite how well this sold is anyone's guess. Its hard to imagine the audience for Conan (and Certificate 18 barbarian film fare) were perusing the table (it was always a table in them days) of annuals displayed in WH Smith. But maybe the sheer inability of younger readers to see the movie in cinemas actually helped sales. 

They didn't publish another Conan annual over here and the magazine itself shuttered the following year.  

1984: DOCTOR WHO BULLETIN ISSUE 16

From November 1984: the sixteenth issue of DOCTOR WHO BULLETIN (aka DWB).

The campaign to see the partially-shot-and-subsequently-abandoned SHADA completed didn't pay immediate dividends (and DWB soon decided they didn't want Producer JNT to have any involvement with any aspect of the show... even after it was cancelled) but it was eventually completed (on a budget of £5 or thereabouts) in the next decade when new bridging material was shot, for a VHS release, to bridge the gaps between the completed location work and partially finished (before a strike Halted shooting) studio sessions. 

The VHS only specials were overseen by JNT (calm down DWB!) and this, along with the "years tapes" remain one of the few releases and projects not revisited in the DVD era. Payments to the estate of writer Douglas Adams may have helped nix any proposed projects. 

Clips from SHADA were recycled for THE FIVE DOCTORS (ensuring Tom Baker's partial participation) and the rushes were subsequently shown at the BFI. They vary from the quite good to the cringey.   

1984: DOCTOR WHO BULLETIN ISSUE 14

From September 1984: the 14th issue of DOCTOR WHO BULLETIN (aka DWB) with a headline story focusing on the quest for missing Doctor Who episodes dumped from the BBC's own archives but possibly still buried in the vaults of overseas broadcasters.

This was from a period before DWB had declared that WHO Producer JNT was public enemy numero uno, so he was clearing still willing to grant interviews with a publication which, arguably, later tried to destroy his career and reputation. 

1984: DOCTOR WHO BULLETIN ISSUE 12/13

From the summer of 1984: the special DOCTOR WHO BULLETIN (aka DWB) double issue 12 & 13.

The cover design is, unfortunately, pretty weak with the font and tramline effects both misfiring. 

But, they're right. The original series was seldom as good as Androzani again. But, much as the JNT baiting editor might have been loathed to admit it, there were a few more corkers in the future.  

1984: DOCTOR WHO BULLETIN ISSUE 11

From June 1984: DOCTOR WHO BULLETIN (aka DWB and, eventually, DREAMWATCH) breaks some news (remember when magazines and fanzines could still break news?) on the upcoming THE TWO DOCTORS. 

Nice use of the colour green as well. Ahem.