1996: COMICS INTERNATIONAL ANNOUNCES MARVEL PRESENTS PARAMOUNT COMICS... AND A NEW HOME FOR STAR TREK COMICS

From March 1996: CAOMICS INTERNATIONAL issue 66 reports the launch of the MARVEL PRESENTS PARAMOUNT COMICS imprint and the return of the STAR TREK publishing franchise to the House of Ideas.

The tie-up was quite productive (as you'll see from previous posts) over a two-year period but is best remembered for flooding the market with more STAR TREK comics than ever before (and snatching the license away from DC).  In addition to the Trek books, a few other one-shots based on Paramount properties also snuck out before the deal was wound up as Marvel's financial position became ever more dicey.

1974: MARVEL'S PLANET OF THE APES MAGAZINE ISSUE 1

From 1974: The first issue of Marvel's PLANET OF THE APES magazine.

It's safe to say that Marvel, along with most other Apes merchandisers, were very late to the Apes party.  FOX really started to push the franchise when reruns of the movies became a TV hit, leading to the launch of the short-lived POTA live-action TV series.

The show was something of a missed opportunity.  The weekly format left the door wide open to further explore the future but - instead - the producers (imported - rather tellingly - from Saturday morning animation) opted to graft the familiar FUGITIVE formula (beloved of Seventies SF shows for no good reason and with little success) onto a neutered version of the first film.

Ironically, despite being tempted by the ratings bonanza promised by an Apes ongoing series (it didn't happen... the show was cancelled after only 14 episodes... and there has always been some question about whether all fourteen ever played... officially they didn't), Marvel's license covered strip adaptations of the movies, and new stories set within their universe, but not the TV show itself.  Although they covered that in text features within the magazine.

Marvel hit some last-minute licensing problems with this first issue and had to pulp some of the already printed pages.  The terms of their license - as was industry standard - did not include the right to portray the actors in print.  Fox, at the last moment, got cold feet that - despite being deliberately generic - Charlton Heston (apparently notorious for calling in the lawyers) might still sue.  So, with the first pages already rolling off the presses, Marvel had to call a hault whilst the pages were reworked by the Bullpen and then reprinted.

The strips and articles that appeared in the US magazine were - of course - ported across to the British weekly edition.  Publishing the two editions created all sorts of deadline headaches with the British edition always running close to exhausting the supply of unpublished US strips.  Some material appeared in the UK before the States (and individual pages were sometimes reworked - with panels cut - for the US edition) and - infamously - Apeslayer was created, from old Killraven pages, just to plug a gap for a few weeks.

The American magazine ultimately ran to 29 issues between 1974-77.  It spun off a regular colour comic, ADVENTURES ON THE PLANET OF THE APES, which coloured and reprinted the adaptations of the first two movies, in 1975.

The British weekly clocked up 123 issues, also between 1974 to 1977.  It absorbed the British edition of DRACULA LIVES from issue 88 and continued as a double-header for the rest of the run.  The POTA strip then moved across to THE MIGHTY WORLD OF MARVEL (from issue 231) where the remaining US material ran through to 246.  At which point Marvel surrendered the license.  The Apes slot on MWOM was taken by Dracula reprints, on hiatus since the merger.

Malibu Comics picked up the license in 1990 and mixed some Marvel reprints into their publishing schedule.  They reissued Marvel's adaptations of the first three movies (ESCAPE is interesting as it opens with a deleted scene that doesn't appear in the finished film but was - it seems - filmed and subsequently lost) and a four-issue limited series that reran the TERROR ON THE PLANET OF THE APES storyline.  All of the Malibu editions are now pretty hard to find.

This year should see the first reprints of the Marvel strips in book form... and I'm looking forward to finally seeing them widely available again.

The Marvel magazine always boasted the most wonderful covers.  These were mixed into the British run alongside a lot of specially-commissioned, and mostly not-as-good, new covers.  STARLOGGED has published a full UK POTA Apes gallery in the dim-and-distant past.

The Apes returned to British newsagents in 2001 for a brief run of a tie-in magazine/ comic pegged to the Tim Burton revival.  The terms of the licesne restricted any crossover with the classic Apes saga.  The lackluster response to the movie quickly sealed the fate of the tie-in.

1995: COMICS INTERNATIONAL REPORTS THE EXPANSION OF THE MARVEL MUSIC LINE

From February 1995: COMICS INTERNATIONAL reports the substantial expansion of the MARVEL MUSIC imprint.

This one caught my eye because it got me wondering: how many of these projects actually made it into stores?  This looks like a very ambitious publishing slate... yet copies of Marvel's music industry books very seldom seem to surface.  Which makes me think many of them were distributed in very small numbers, were distributed outside the direct market or (and given the dodgy financial status of Marvel - and the marketplace - at the time) never actually happened at all.

1994: MARVEL BUYS MALIBU COMICS.

From December 1994: Marvel Comics gobbles up the MALIBU ULTRAVERSE, as reported in the UK's COMICS INTERNATIONAL.

Malibu, one-time home of Alien Nation, Planet of the Apes, Japanese animation, Deep Space Nine and softcore titty books, hit pay dirt when - for a year - they looked after the just-launched Image Comics and, when that contract came to an end, they realised there was a good living to be made from superheroes.  So they unleashed the Ultraverse.  

Fair to say they were not the only publisher to be launching new shared universe books at the time.  Dark Horse went for it in a big way and gave the world Barb Wire.  There was Milestone.  Marvel had a whole bunch of new universes, including our own UKverse.  

But Malibu burned pretty bright.  In addition to A LOT of comics, they also expanded fast into syndicated animation (Ultraforce), action figures, computer games, TV advertising ('Jump On Now'), TV series (Glen Larson's Nightman adaptation) and much else besides.  They were burning bright... but also burning cash.

The owners raised the 'for sale' sign and DC came oround to measure for curtains.  That paniced Marvel who knew a DC takeover would catipult their rival to numero uno by marketshare... and that would dent Marvel's all important shareprice.  So they swooped.  

It's pretty safe to say that Marvel were only vaguely interested in the comics themselves.  The move removed a competitor but Malibu's existing multimedia deals didn't sit well with Marvel's business people and the characters were never going to be as important to Marvel as their own.  But they must have wondered how an upstart like Malibu could get a two-season deal for a (cheap) syndicated action show when Stan Lee had spent a decade in Hollywood delivering not very much.  

Marvel made some half-hearted moves to merge the Ultraverse with the Marvel Universe (this was, after all, the era where inter-company crossovers were pretty much a monthly event) but Marvel fans weren't interested and Ultraverse readers resented the takeover.  The line was slimmed... and then closed altogether.  And another sub-set of 'Marvel' characters were warehoused.  

Which is the interesting bit.  Marvel will dust off old characters either just because they can or because the lawyers tell them they are in danger of slipping out of copyright.  But the lawyers are saying something else about the Malibu Ultraverse.  It seems that the whole shebang is out-of-bounds.  And no-one seems to quite know why.  Although it is a safe bet that someone, somewhere, would have to be paid if they were resurected.  And it seems that Disney and Marvel just don't care that much.  

The good news is that - should you be tempted - the Ultraverse is a staple of the 50p back issue box.  Dealers must have ordered so many of these books that they are still trying to shift the stock decades later.  There are - of course - a lot of special and limited edition copies (this WAS the 1990s) that are harder to find but the core books are a pretty easy find.  Take a punt.  

BTW: Stan's EXCELSIOR COMICS, yet another Marvel imprint, failed to see the light of day.  

1982: MARVEL'S ANNIE MOVIE ADAPTATION

From late 1982: The sun will come out tomorrow... the two-part Marvel adaptation of the ANNIE musical movie, another long-forgotten outing from the celluloid-obsessed publisher prone to adapting any film which looked like it might be a hit.  And another musical... despite the obvious problems with trying to translate music onto the printed page.

Annie, of course, started life as a comic strip... so you can almost see the logic.  And maybe Marvel hoped that it would breakout beyond their core readership of teenage boys.  I doubt this run - and the Superspecial magazine which published the same material - registered very highly on the Marvel sales charts.  Which probably makes them some of the rarer Marvel Comics of the period.  I picked them up from a 50p box.

1993: GHOST RIDER AND THE MIDNIGHT SONS MAGAZINE: A MARVEL AGE SPECIAL (MARVEL COMICS)

From December 1993: More Halloween scarefare... GHOST RIDER AND THE MIDNIGHT SONS MAGAZINE, a behind-the-scenes/ promotional one-shot mag spun off from the pages of MARVEL AGE.

It's a reminder of a time when Marvel's horror and supernatural books were briefly in the ascendance in the early 1990s boom times. The Bullpen, on a mission to flood the market, quickly built a family of horror books to max out reader interest in the genre sparked by the initial success of the Ghost Rider revival. Once interest waned, the line was once again slimmed down to the core books.

1977: LOGAN'S RUN ISSUE 1 (MARVEL COMICS)

From January 1977 (but published late the previous year): the first issue of Marvel's brief dalliance with the LOGAN'S RUN franchise.

The MGM movie tie-in proved short-lived... canned after only seven months on the stands. The swift end was apparently down to licensing issues surrounding the creation of new material and the launch of the TV incarnation (the rights to which weren't covered in the Marvel deal... restricting comic strip versions to the British annual and the weekly LOOK-IN strip). Sales probably looked pretty puny once the STAR WARS juggernaut blasted into town a few months later.

Marvel UK didn't run these strips, possibly for the self-same licensing reasons, but - as the 10p cover price tells - copies were shipped to the UK as part of the bundle that went to British newsagents.

1986: LABYRINTH MOVIE ADAPTATION ISSUE 1 (MARVEL COMICS)

From November 1986: the first (of three) instalement of Marvel's adaptation of the Mighty Jim Henson's LABYRINTH.

The adaptation also appeared as a done-in-one edition of the glossy MARVEL SUPER SPECIAL magazine.

There was no British edition.

I was reminded of this because I spotted the new Titan Books coffee table book dedicated to the making of the movie in Forbidden Planet last week.

All hail the Goblin King.

1996: INDEPENDENCE DAY MOVIE ADAPTATION ISSUES 0-2 (MARVEL COMICS)

From June and July 1996: issues 0 (an original pre-movie teaser) - 2 of Marvel's INDEPENDENCE DAY movie adaptation. Issues 1 & 2 adapted the movie proper.

There wss also a British edition from MARVEL UK which - from memory - only included the adaptation itself.

I saw the sequel (a film surely no one was clamoring for) a couple of weekends ago and it really was something of a stinker. It looked amazing but the plotting and scripting were really poor: a succession of sequences linked together (or, occasionally, not linked at all) by some remarkable leaps of faith and logic. I have nothing against dumb movies... but ID4 II was just poor.

1977: THE DEEP MOVIE ADAPTATION (MARVEL COMICS)

From 1977: Marvel's done-in-one adaptation of the movie THE DEEP.

The movie was adapted from the novel by Peter Benchley, starred Robert Shaw and was set in the sea... so it came with JAWS-sized expectations of a runaway blockbuster.

Presumably that expectation, and the opening scene, propelled it to becoming the 8th higest grossing movie in the States that year. Having seen the movie far more recently, I can report that lightning did not strike the ocean twice and this was - in fact - no Jaws.

1991: THE DESTROYER (LIMITED SERIES) ISSUE 1 (MARVEL COMICS)

From December 1991: Marvel USA followed-up THE DESTROYER black & white magazine (see post previous) with this more traditional (IE slightly more likely to be stocked in comic book stores... and noticed by would-be readers) comic book limited series.

The REMO WILLIAMS film is now available on shiny BR disc... and well worth revisiting. Or - more likely - seeing for the first time.

1981: JAMES BOND 007 FOR YOUR EYES ONLY ADAPTATION (MARVEL COMICS)

From October & November 1981: A spot of Marvel BONDage... the Bullpen's two-issue adaptation of the Roger Moore (did he really have art approval on that first cover?) outing FOR YOUR EYES ONLY.

This limited run repurposed the material that also appeared in the MARVEL SUPER SPECIAL magazine issue 19 (which also used that Howard Chaykin cover) and marked the first time that Marvel had chronicled a 007 adventure (they followed up with OCTOPUSSY, from the Marvel UK team). Marvel had apparently been minded to use this as a launching point for an ongoing James Bond series but a deal couldn't be struck with Eon and the proposal faltered.

UK readers belatedly saw this as one of the movie back-up strips during the first year of RETURN OF THE JEDI weekly.

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.

1990: DARKMAN MOVIE ADAPTATION (MARVEL COMICS)

From October/ November 1990: Marvel's three issue adaptation of the horror/ superhero hybrid movie DARKMAN, co-written and directed by Sam Raimi and starring Liam Neeson.

Despite a distinctly b-movie feel, this seemed to enthuse both audiences and critics and had a fair amount of mainstream success. Marvel was one of the original licencees and timed these three issues (and a black & white magazine version) to coincide with the big screen release. Buoyed with initial success, they then followed up with a second series of new stories. That hit three years later (no rush) and ran for six issues.

Universal bankrolled a TV pilot in 1992 but couldn't find a buyer for a weekly series version. Direct to video sequels inevitably followed.

1991: MARVEL AGE MAGAZINE ISSUE 100

From May 1991: MARVEL AGE MAGAZINE, the in-house fanzine for Marvel's wares, celebrates its 100th regular issue with this silver ink cover.

Despite being officially designated a magazine, it always appeared in a comic book format and in standard comic book dimensions.

A 100 issue run is it itself pretty impressive but MA eventually mustered 140 regular issues (it succumbed to the imploding market in September 1994) as well as sundry annuals and preview specials as well as several magazine one-shots.

1996: MAVEL STAR TREK COMICS IN STAR TREK COMMUNICATOR

From August/ September 1996: STAR TREK COMMUNICATOR magazine, published by THE OFFICIAL STAR TREK FAN CLUB, previews the launch of the new line of STAR TREK comics published under the Marvel/ Paramount imprint.

Although Trek has been a mainstay of comic books since the era of the original TV show (or earlier in the case of the UK, thanks to the JOE 90 weekly getting a head start on the BBC) I've never felt there's a particularly large section of Trek fans that would also dip into the comic adventures of Kirk and crew. Clearly enough to sustain two regular books and the occasional special, annual and limited series but a whole imprint?

Marvel, in typical Nineties excess, snatched away the contract (thanks to their swoop on Malibu Comics) with the promise of a myriad of ongoing series based in some pretty obscure facets of the franchise.

A saturated market, too few readers, a big licensing bill, nose diving sales across the industry and Marvel's own perilous financial status conspired to make this the boom before the bust... but there was some good stuff published over the following two years.

It's crazy to think that this line was launching twenty years ago already...

1991: MARVEL ILLUSTRATED SWIMSUIT EDITION (MARVEL COMICS)

From 1991: STARLOGGED is celebrating the official start of the summer season with a bit of Fan Boy stress relief... The oh-so-blatant MARVEL ILLUSTRATED SWIMSUIT EDITION, packed full to the rafters with newly commissioned cheesecake art of your favourite Marvel Guys and Gals (with an emphasis on the ladies) ready to catch the summer sunshine.

The artists clearly enjoyed it because it gave them a chance to show their characters in more - ahem - casual attire and inject a bit of humour. The teenboy audience clearly liked it because it combined their two favourite subjects: comics and the untouchable opposite sex. What more could you need on those hot summer nights?

Swimsuit editions were a bit of a thing back in the day, even the otherwise reputable AMAZING HEROES jumped on the bandwagon with a couple of special issues of the regular run. Unfortunately their comparatively low-fi production values hardly elevated them into the SPORTS ILLUSTRATED (which is what this one-shot was spoofing) top tier.

I don't think Marvel ever repeated this just-post-pubecent PLAYBOY substitute and the whole thing feels like a bygone from another age today.

1993: AVENGERS ANNIVERSARY MAGAZINE (MARVEL COMCS)

From November 1993: Marvel New York celebrated thirty years of THE AVENGERS with this glossy one-shot magazine, officially a spin-off from the not-magazine-sized MARVEL AGE MAGAZINE.

Marvel published a bunch of these in the early 1990s with a similar edition devoted to THE X-MEN, an objectification-packed celebration of the fictional flesh with a Swimsuit magazine (riffing on the SPORTS ILLUSTRATED tradition) and a couple of annual in-universe retrospectives spoofing the likes of TIME and NEWSWEEK.

The fad proved relatively short-lived (maybe it was just cheaper and easier to concoct another PUNISHER one-shot?) and the magazine line quietly went away when the market tanked.

The contents were all text based, albeit illustrated by numerous panels and covers from the Marvel vaults.

1979: WHAT IF SGT. FURY HAD FOUGHT WORLD WAR TWO IN OUTER SPACE (MARVEL COMICS)

From April 1979: One of the strangest Star Age entries from Marvel Comics: WHAT IF SGT. FURY HAD FOUGHT WORLD WAR TWO IN OUTER SPACE? Really.

WHAT IF issue 14 is, as the cover so tellingly teases, silly stuff (a cigar... in a spacesuit) but delivered with a whopping dose of action and is well worth digging out of the back issues boxes if found at a reasonable price.

I was convinced that this had an outing in STAR WARS WEEKLY here in the UK because I'm sure I read it in one of the weeklies when I was little. But I'm struggling to track down the correct issues... Which makes me wonder whether I imagined it. And yet... I must have seen it somewhere in the British line. A mystery! 

Despite boasting a classic Nick Fury in Space cover on its first issue (reviving the old British Marvel tradition of covers that only roughly related to the actual contents), the strip wasn't recycled in the pages of FUTURE TENSE... but probably would have been had the fortuitous failure of VALOUR not alleviated the need to find enough reprints to feed the SF anthology.

1995: ULTRAVERSE NEW WORLD ORDER

From Autumn 1995... When Worlds Collide: Marvel merges the MALIBU ULTRAVERSE.

Malibu had been knocking around for a few years publishing under a variety of imprints (including Eternity and Adventure) when they were unexpectedly thrust into the big time when they signed-up to provide professional services for the launch year of Image Comics. That arrangement didn't last long but once Malibu realised that the market for alternative superhero books was booming, they decided they wanted to hang into their slipped of the action.

The result was the ULTRAVERSE, a made-for-the-mainstream new universe which dodged the issue of all the top artists either defecting to Image or signing exclusive contracts with the existing publishers by being a "writer's universe".

The line encountered some early success and even signed some pretty impressive media deals (for the NIGHT MAN live-action show and ULTRAFORCE cartoon) but started to struggle when the industry plunged into recession in late 1993. The owners looked for a White Knight buyer and came very close to brokering a deal with DC Comics. Marvel got wind of the deal and feared the deal would catapult their rival to the top in
terms of market share. That put their share price under threat and the whole highly leveraged house of cards in danger of collapse.

So they swooped in and snapped up their one time rival (DC swallowed Wildstorm instead) and soon went about cutting cost out of their West Coast operation and integrated the spoils of their conquest with the existing Marvel line. The results were Black September and the New World Order reboot.

The move was not a hit with fans of either line and Marvel, mired in financial problems, soon shuttered the whole Ultraverse operation (but not before using the Malibu tie-up to secure a new licencing deal with Paramount Pictures through their Trek license). Fuzzy ownership, and financial penalties, have placed the characters out-of-bounds ever since.

This scans are from a shop giveaway published by Marvel to promote the reboot,