1981: THREE MARVEL UK TITLES THAT NEVER WERE (Probably)

From August 1981: Is this the British Bullpen's equivalent of Assistant Editors Month?  The week that some Ballpenner rashly announced three new titles... none of which actually appeared (unless you know otherwise).

WESTERN GUNFIGHTERS would have been the logical progression from the three Specials over the past couple of years... Although with Britain's youth fully immersed in the Star Age, its hard to imagine a long line forming at the newsagents to grab copies of creaky Marvel cowboy reprints.  

Did the SUPERTRONIC SPECIAL, dedicated to all-things-gizmo, ever surface?  I've certainly never seen a copy although, given its subject matter, it's unlikely to have had much appeal to collectors.  Computer and tech mags were a boom business in the Eighties but Marvel (at least in the UK... they had BLIP in the States) didn't capitalize.  

The impending TIME BANDITS one-shot may have been a reference to imported copies of the US Super Special Adaptation rather than a specific British edition.  But, either way, I don't think it happened.  The US adaptation came from the British creative team of Parkhouse and Lloyd but, ultimately, the only UK outing was as a back-up strip in the pages of RETURN OF THE JEDI weekly.  

This page also makes the bold statement that the much-missed glossy covers would not be making a comeback... but, of course, they did... within months.

This page appeared in MARVEL SUPER ADVENTURE issue 15 (cover-dated 12 August 1981)... and probably the other weeklies as well. 

1980: WESTERN GUNFIGHTERS SPECIALS (Marvel UK)

Summer 1980

Winter 1980

Summer 1981

Science Fiction was still the hot property in the playground during 1980 and 1981 (fuelled by the release of ESB, MISSION GALACTICA and the belated TV debuts of Battlestar and Buck Rogers), so it's slightly odd that the British Bullpen were so convinced that kids really wanted to read about cowboys.

MARVEL UK even announced a monthly WESTERN GUNFIGHTERS title in 1981… although it never actually launched and the project was quietly dropped.   

1980-81 WESTERN GUNFIGHTERS SPECIALS (Marvel UK)

I've always found these three Marvel UK WESTERN GUNFIGHTERS SPECIALS, published in 1980-81 pretty perplexing.  This was the height of the SF boom years (THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and MISSION GALACTICA were in cinemas, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25th CENTURY, DOCTOR WHO and BLAKE'S SEVEN were on British TV) yet - somewhat counter-intuitively - Marvel seemed to think the kids would lap-up these creaky reprints (in fairness, the Caleb Hammer strip from the '81 special was a recent import from MARVEL PREMIERE) from a bygone age.

Maybe I'm being a little unfair, the fact that three specials appeared suggests that someone, somewhere, was buying these.  Or, at the very least, distributors and newsagents remained enthusiastic.

Part of Dez Skinn's brief was to expand the British Marvel offering outside of the traditional superhero fare and make better use of the Marvel back catalogue.  And cowboys were certainly hitherto untapped.  Probably with good reason.

The original piece of Frank Bellamy art adorning the Summer 1980 edition was a piece actually owned by Skinn.

Skinn had departed the company by the summer of 1980 which shows that the enthusiasm for the title went further than Skinn himself.  Most of his one-shots were intended as pilots for possible ongoing titles, although there's no sign that a cowboy title was in the offing.

SUMMER 1980

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WINTER 1980

SUMMER 1981