2016: FUTURE BUYS IMAGINE PUBLISHING

Buried deep in today's financial pages (which, of course, are buried deep under under tons of Brexit coverage) is the news that FUTURE have purchased IMAGINE PUBLISHING and their portfolio of 19 titles (plus tons of bookazines and digital-only publications) for £14.2 million.

This of course means that SFX and SCI-FI NOW will now be part of the Future stable.  Will Future (notorious for ruthlessly slimming down in the face of falling print sales) want to keep both titles going or will a merger/ closure be on the cards?

Or will Future look to sell on SFN as a going concern to another publisher?

Keep watching the shelves....

2016: PANINI LAUNCH NEW MARVEL CIVIL WAR COMIC IN THE UK

From - ahem - yesterday: spotted in WH SMITH, the first issue of Panini's new CIVIL WAR Collectors Edition format mag.

Top marks to the publisher for investing in the launch (pegged to a certain movie don't you know) by buying space in one of those shelf boxes.

The contents itself are another outing for the oft-reprinted Marvel event of a few years back. The core series wasn't a long-runner but the sheer number of crossovers and spin-off could fuel this launch for years.

In addition to the opening salvo of strips, there were also some feature pages tucked in the back culled from the old in-house hype mag (and successor to MARVEL AGE) MARVEL SPOTLIGHT.

I grabbed my copy but haven't had a chance to look at it in detail yet.

2016: TOWER RECORDS DOCUMENTARY: ALL THINGS MUST PASS

From 2016: I watched the documentary feature film ALL THINGS MUST PASS last night, charting the creation, rise and fall of the TOWER RECORDS chain.

It's a fascinating story in its own right but also, through the growth and then collapse of one retailer, charts (hohum) the roller coaster growth and then painful contraction of both the music industry and the entertainment emporiums that sold their wares like Tower, Virgin, HMV (hanging in there), Woolworths, Andy's Records, MVC, Music Box, Silver Screen and the once sprawling entertainment departments in retail chains as diverse as WH Smith, Boots the Chemist and Debenhams.

I remember the UK Tower flagship in London's Piccadilly Circus (at one time you could look out the store's front door and see large branches of HMV and Virgin in two directions... all gone now) mostly because it sold CDs you couldn't hope to find in any of the Oxford Street flagships but mostly because it had the most excellent magazine department in the basement.  It carried obscure titles, mostly American, that you would never hope to find anywhere else.  I saw my first copies of NATIONAL ENQUIRER (in the days before it secured UK national distribution), WEEKLY WORLD NEWS (Bat Boy!), ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, BEN IS DEAD (I wish I'd hung onto those... doh!) and countless others there.  

The UK flagship opened in 1985 and was sold to Virgin when Tower retreated from the UK in 2003 (part of their ultimately unsuccessful attempts to save the core business by retreating from their overseas locations).  They promptly closed their megastore across the street (which always felt like little more than a spoiler anyway) and moved into the Tower store. 

After a refit, it traded under the Virgin brand until, clearly sensing the writing was on the wall, Branson sold out to his own management team in 2007.  Now trading under the Zavvi banner, it remained open until the chain collapsed in early 2009.  Their downfall was the collapse of Woolworths and, specifically, Woolies' wholesale entertainment business (dragged down with the stores).  Zavvi found itself unable to secure new stock at favourable terms and, with little to sell, slipped into administration.  HMV purchased some of their former sites but the Piccadily Circus branch closed for good.  

At their UK peak, Tower operated a number of UK stores and I also frequented the West London stores on High Street Kensington (their first UK branch... which also continued trading as Virgin and then Zavvi) and Whiteleys shopping centre.  

2016: STARLOGGED NEWS

STARLOGGED doesn't normally do New Stuff News but there are a couple of new releases this week that will be of interest to MARVEL UK readers of old.

This week's issue of the long-running (now extended, according to the insert, to 200 issues) MARVEL FACT FILES (the put-it-in-a-binder weekly artwork) is another MARVEL UK SPECIAL, dedicated to the company, the creators and the characters. One really nice feature this time is a look back at the comics that were spiked, sometimes at the very last minute, in the Genesis Implosion of late 1993. Highly recommended.

Also out this week is the trade paperback collection of the entire FRONTIER COMICS offering, also from 1993. That's a line of long-forgotten (but actually really good) books that I never thought would come into print again. Especially not ahead of the core UK-verse books. Its priced at £30 (Marvel trades are certainly not cheap) which means it would be cheaper to raid the 50p boxes for the complete run (which is what I did) but its well put together with new introductions to each series, some behind-the-scenes art and the MARVEL AGE MAGAZINE article I posted here way-back-when. Marvel obviously couldn't include some of the contemporary fanzine coverage so, for more perspectives (COMICS SPECULATOR NEWS anyone?), look back through previous STARLOGGED posts.

Finally, London's CINEMA STORE is closing this Saturday. I've been a regular customer there since the early 1990s so although I was never a big spender, they've been a constant Geek Stuff supplier to me. I would think that the writing has been on the wall for years (almost everything they sold became cheaper online over time or were superseded by digital equivalents) but they were still good for magazines and books that weren't carried elsewhere. Their pricing was seldom keen (they would sell copies of ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY for a tenner... when you could get it for £2.75 in Soho newsagents) which helped, I think, cement their reputation for fleecing shoppers. For many years, prior to the opening of BORDERS (and CS jacking up their prices), they were by regular source of EW... and many other magazines as well. I will miss them.