STARLOGGED - GEEK MEDIA AGAIN

Friday, 4 May 2012

1974: PLANET OF THE APES (MARVEL UK EDITION) - PART 1

Back to 1974 and Marvel UK... GOES APE!

- The first PLANET OF THE APES film was released in 1968, the last (BATTLE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES) in 1973.
- The second film, BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, had already been adapted by US publisher Gold Key Comics in 1970. Marvel adapted it for a second time.
- The POTA material published in the weekly was, with one exception, all also seen in the US black and white PLANET OF THE APES magazine, published by Marvel New York's Curtis Magazines imprint (29 issues, 1974-77).
- The UK POTA weekly launched the same week as the horror-themed DRACULA LIVES weekly.
- POTA was the first Marvel comic based on a Hollywood property.
- Future SMASH HITS editor (and pop star) Neil Tennant was Marvel's London editor although most production work was handled by the New York office.
- POTA was the first M-UK title to publish material almost simultaneously with the United States. This meant, at times, that the UK edition was running material BEFORE the US edition, effectively making the US magazine the reprint.
- This unique situation, and the UK strip's more flexible page count, occasionally meant that panels published in the UK weekly were omitted (to condense pages) in the US magazine.
- Marvel UK's other weeklies were still reprinting sixties inventory, giving them the luxury of not having to worry about the supply running out anytime soon. Not so for POTA and, in issues 23 - 30, Marvel had to devise a brief filler to bridge the gap before regular service was resumed. The cost-conscious solution was APESLAYER, butchered reprints of US Killraven strips, replacing the existing aliens with apes!
- The weekly ran a mix of covers created for the US magazine and newly created covers by American artists.
- US writer Doug Moench adapted all five Apes movies... but never even saw the later ones. In the days before VHS, and working years after they were released in movie houses, he had no practical way of viewing them. He worked from scripts instead.
- Marvel encountered an unexpected problem with their adaptation of the first movie. Their license didn't include likeness rights to actor Charlton Heston so Marvel's Taylor was deliberately drawn to look very different. Except FOX's licensing people thought their first efforts still looked too much like the actor... and demanded changes.
- The weekly ran for 123 issues. It absorbed DRACULA LIVES from issue 88, adding US Tomb of Dracula reprints. It merged with THE MIGHTY WORLD OF MARVEL from 231, running Apes material until 246 (June 1977).
- Back-up strips included the jungle-themed Ka-zar, adaptations of Killdozer (also made into a TV movie) and The Day of the Triffids (years before the BBC adaptation), Tomb of Dracula and Man-Thing (carried-over from the cancelled DRACULA LIVES) and, latterly, Conan the Barbarian.
- The UK saw three hardback POTA annuals, from Brown & Watson, published from 1975-77. These were based on the TV series and published independently of Marvel.
- Both the US and UK editions ran articles on the making of the POTA TV series but Marvel never secured the comic strip rights. The only strips to feature the characters and situations appeared in the UK annuals and an unlicensed Argentine comic.
- The first part of Marvel's ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES adaptation features an apes-in-space sequence entirely omitted from the film. This sequence was scripted (and possibly shot) but the film begins with the craft already splash-landed on 20th century Earth.

ISSUE 1

26 October 1974

PLANET OF THE APES movie adaptation begins.

Free poster.

Stan Lee editorial from issue 1.

ISSUE 2

2 November 1974

ISSUE 3

9 November 1974

ISSUE 4

16 November 1974

ISSUE 5

22 November 1974

ISSUE 6

30 November 1974

ISSUE 7

7 December 1974

ISSUE 8

14 December 1974

ISSUE 9

21 December 1974

ISSUE 10

29 December 1974

ISSUE 11

4 January 1975

ISSUE 12

11 January 1975

ISSUE 13

18 January 1975

ISSUE 14

25 January 1975

ISSUE 15

1 February 1975

ISSUE 16

8 February 1975

ISSUE 17

15 February 1975

ISSUE 18

22 February 1975

ISSUE 19

1 March 1975

ISSUE 20

8 March 1975

ISSUE 21

15 March 1975

ISSUE 22

22 March 1975

ISSUE 23

29 March 1975

ISSUE 24

5 April 1975

ISSUE 25

12 April 1975

- TO BE CONTINUED -

Thursday, 3 May 2012

1993: SPIDER-MAN PHOTO STRIP

Eat your heart out (new) EAGLE! This is a bonkers bit of fun from the pages of Marvel UK's THE EXPLOITS OF SPIDER-MAN issue 11 (28 July 1993), an oft-overlooked M-UK title which actually had a lot of cool stuff (such as this full-page, live-action Death's Head II pin-up).

Despite the Manhattan skyline, this was (if you know what to look for) clearly shot on the roof of M-UK's Arundel House base. The white (ish) building in the background of the second panel is the hotel-cum-office block on the opposite side of Arundel Street (at the time of writing, the site is empty and about to be demolished). If "Christine" was to look to her right, she'd see the Thames and LWT's (now ITV's) South Bank studios.

Who's playing Christine? Who is that masked man? Is that bulge enhanced? We don't know.

1984: THE THING IS BIG BEN

Even in 1984, this seemed an improbable new launch from Marvel UK. There's no doubt that the Thing was an iconic, eye-catching character, with some mainstream recognition thanks to the FANTASTIC FOUR animated series (although the same theory failed to make the 1980s FF weekly a success) but... did the (super) powers-that-be ever seriously think this was going to be a winner?

There's several schools of thought about how this ever happened:

1. Someone thought of the punning title (maybe while ensconced in a Queensway drinking den) and no-one else was sober enough to stop them making it.

2. The Marvel Two-In-One strips from RAMPAGE MAGAZINE had been more popular than anyone suspected.

3. Someone had tipped-off Marvel management that the animated Thing series (aired in the States as part of the misleadingly-titled collision-of-concepts FRED AND BARNEY MEET THE THING. They never did meet, the segments were separate) but, maybe, no-one warned them that Marvel had applied its typical quality-control process to licensing its characters and it bore little resemblance to the premise of the comics. Either way, the TV show never reached the UK.

4. Marvel, engaged in a dispute with WARRIOR MAGAZINE over ownership of the Marvel Man name, thought they'd stir the pot a little more by launching a comic with the same name as an existing Warrior strip.

5. Marvel wanted to test their new colour-at-a-lower-cover-price format before rolling it out to more established comics.

The weekly line-up was originally reprints of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE (issue 92-100 of the Team-Up style US monthly anchored by The Thing), Iron Man and Captain America (an Avengers-centric line-up reminiscent of CAPTAIN AMERICA's weekly). But Cap was quickly jettisoned in favour of Power Man and Iron Fist (making it even more a replacement for the defunct RAMPAGE). That line-up, supported by the oddly out-of-place Donald Dogfly humour strip from Hunt Emerson, remained until the lead strip was hastily bundled into SPIDER-MAN after only 18 weeks.

TTIBB had a unique for mat amongst the M-UK line. It ran alternate colour and black and white spreads (which always gave the impression of watching a TV with a faulty colour control) following the same formula as contemporary issues of SPIDER-MAN, INDIANA JONES and THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN but was able to shave a few pence off the cover price by sacrificing glossy covers (a throwback of sorts to the early seventies and the 1979-82 "Skinn format"). The format, perhaps because it wasn't well suited to M-UK's new licensed comics, never took off and wasn't used again.

Issues 1 and 2 came with free card-based gifts. The first issue came with a paper hat of the sort given out free at the Radio One Roadshow (the cover art shows it being red, but it was actually blue). Issue two excelled itself with the hilariously named Big Ben Banger (its like they employed Benny Hill to devise their giveaways), a new name for a familiar freebie.

The appearance of ROM in the lead strip (issues 15-16), reprinted from Marvel Two In One 99, marked the Space Knight's last UK appearance (his SECRET WARS II crossover was omitted from the British run).

In addition to the weekly, Marvel also published an album-format special in the summer of 1984. Strangely, in addition to more Two-in-One reprints (the Stonehenge-centric strip from US MTIO 33, the conclusion of a run of UK-based adventures), the special also ran original X-Men strips (from US issues 48 and 57) despite the fact Marvel's merry mutants had nothing to do with the weekly.