1974: MARVEL UK POSTER OFFER

Here's a Mighty Marvel UK offer from April 1974: MARVEL POSTERS (by an uncredited Spanish artist... any ideas?)!  Six poster for 90p (and that includes VAT and the postage). Brilliant!  What could possibly go wrong?  

Well... as it happens...

As this Bullpen Bulletins (masquerading as the Marvel Bulletin Board) page from August 1974 shows, the posters were delayed (apparently by a combination of vaguely feasible events... including a missing Daredevil poster) on their land journey across the continent to the UK.

What I do find intriguing is the reference to "announcements in the Daily Express and Daily Mirror".  Does this mean that the poster offer also ran in those papers (possibly as an editorial promotion) and Marvel were forced to apologise there to?  Why else would they want to draw attention to their failures in logistics?  Did anyone reading this get the posters through the papers?  Was it their first introduction to - ahem - the mighty world of Marvel?

1977: STAR WARS OFFICIAL COLLECTORS EDITION from MARVEL

This magazine-format one-shot, published by Marvel, was one of the first official STAR WARS publications to hit the UK, along with the first of two treasury edition reprints of Marvel's movie adaptation.

Copies were shipped to UK newsagents and it was heavily plugged in the Marvel UK range at the end of 1977 and the beginning of 1978.

The cover, above, is from the UK edition although, except for the price information and the Micronauts advert (below) on the back cover (the same advert appeared on the back cover of the first issue of STAR WARS WEEKLY in February 1978), the magazine is identical to the the US edition. 

The double-page spread below gives a flavour of how the interior pages looked.  Surprisingly, for a Marvel publication, there's no comic strip inside and no cross-promotion for either the US monthly or the UK weekly.

Similar (but glossier and more ambitious) tie-ins were also published for the next two films, although neither came from Marvel.

HOUSE AD 1977

1984: WHIZ KIDS in STARLOG MAGAZINE

STARLOG magazine covered WHIZ KIDS, with an interview with co-creator and show runner Phil DeGuerre, in issue 79 (cover-dated February 1984).

1984: WHIZ KIDS in LOOK-IN

WHIZ KIDS (not to be confused with the contemporary series of books with the same name) is one of those great half-forgotten shows of the eighties.  At the time it seemed to be a sure-fire combination of kids, computers, crime and BMX bikes (think: FAMOUS FIVE with gadgets) but its cutting-edge technology has (as these things tend to be) left it looking painfully dated, presumably contributing to a lack of repeats and DVD releases.

The show, which clocked-up a mere 18 episodes, aired for a single season on CBS between October 1983 and June 1984.  It reached the UK, in ITV's Saturday afternoon import slot, in May 1984.

Rather obviously inspired by the flick WARGAMES (1983), the show revolved around the kids solving various computer-related crimes because, of course, the adults had no idea about all this new-fangled technology.

This LOOK-IN cover and centre-spread feature accompanied its UK premiere.

The show's star Matthew Laborteaux (who, judging from the cover above, had unfeasibly hairy arms for a teenager) should have already been (vaguely) familiar to British viewers: he'd previously headlined THE RED HAND GANG, repeated several times by the (value-for-money minded) BBC.

1984: QUESTPROBE one-shot from MARVEL UK

Here's a rarity from the Mighty Marvel UK vaults - a June 1984 one-shot special pegged to the QUESTPROBE computer game series, published in full colour (and with none of the usual printing problems associated with Marvel UK's early adventures in colour comics from this period). 

I must admit I was pretty surprised when I first spotted this issue, I had no idea that it had ever been published.  I've subsequently found some mentions in UK Ballpen Bulletins pages but this was never given much of a push in the rest of the range, nor was it promoted alongside the other 1984 summer specials.

The comic itself is a pretty straightforward A4 reprint of the original US issue (QUESTPROBE issue 1, August 1984), with just the computer game adverts changed so that they work for the British market (see below).

As far as I know (but I'm willing to be proven wrong, given the obscure nature of this one), this was the only UK outing for the QUESTPROBE saga (despite the "limited series" designation on the cover, possibly carried-over in error from the US edition).  Stateside, Marvel published three (of a planned twelve) tie-ins featuring SPIDER-MAN (2) and The Human Torch and the Thing (3).  A fourth issue, featuring THE X-MEN was completed, but scrapped, when the manufacturer, Adventure International, went belly-up.  The material eventually appeared in (that glossy dumping ground for inventory) MARVEL FANFARE (issue 33).

1988: WAR OF THE WORLDS: THE SERIES on VHS

CIC was the video label, jointly run by Paramount and Universal, responsible for releasing their productions on home video in the UK.

CIC had already done well with a series of rental-only STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION tapes assembled from the first season, so it made sense that they would try to replicate that success with syndicated companion show WAR OF THE WORLDS.

This is the sleeve for the first release: the feature-length first episode that establishes the (shaky) premise of the show and - as the title suggests - resurrects the long-dorment Martian menace (albeit now with TV budget-friendly abilities to adopt human form).

It's a competent effort, undermined by a ludicrous premise: turns out Earth was indeed invaded - as shown with various effects shots lifted directly from the original movie (and blatantly reused a few years earlier in cash-strapped V: THE SERIES) - decades earlier and, despite the wholesale destruction, almost everyone (including top military decision makers) has forgotten all about it.  This allows the show to adopt a low-key conspiracy tone (years before THE X-FILES) but is too bonkers to be believable.

The alien 'corpses' left over from the failed invasion have been haphazardly placed into storage, unfortunately adjacent to some equally shoddily stored nuclear waste.  When the two are accidentally mixed, by some ill-fated terrorists of indeterminate nationalities, the invasion is on again.

CIC released a few more of these tapes before abandoning the range.  None of the tapes were ever re-issued for the (much cheaper) sell-through market (unlike ST:TNG which saw the whole seven seasons released... and then re-released in assorted collections, edits and box sets).

1979: SHATNER - THE AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY

It's Shatner: revealed and intimate (but, unfortunately, authorised)!

In recent decades, Shatner has become a one-man publishing machine: bashing out several autobiographies, various STAR TREK novels and even concocting his greatest ever creation: TEK WARS's Jack Cardigan.*

But, in the 1970s, he was bidding his time in TV movie-land, voicing the TREK animated show and waiting for Paramount to decide what to do with their would-be franchise.  That obviously gave him plenty of time to plan this paperback tome (so significant that it required two co-writers), cunningly timed to coincide with big-screen blockbuster STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE.  

I've not actually read this yet, I acquired it (along with several other behind-the-scenes-type) TREK paperbacks from a charity book store, but I'll get around to it some day.

* Although there's a (no doubt totally unjustified) suspicion that his literary contributions roughly equate to Glen Larson's input into the numerous BATTLESTAR novels he supposedly bashed-out (while helming several successful, and quite a few unsuccessful, TV shows) from the late seventies onwards.

1984: C.Y.R.I.L in RETURN OF THE JEDI weekly

Here's another instalment in the mis-adventures of RETURN OF THE JEDI weekly's Editor Droid: C.Y.R.I.L.

This is the fifth week of the strip, originally published in issue 77, cover-dated 8 December 1984. 

1987: MAD MAGAZINE SPOOFS 'V'

THE VISITORS ARE NOT OUR FRIENDS... BUT THEY ARE FUNNY!

V: THE SERIES is already pretty hilarious (and red-hot when sexy space bitches Diana and Lydia are on-screen) but that didn't stop MAD MAGAZINE from having a crack.

This is from the (now long-defunct) British edition of the magazine, published in early 1987.  As the cover line suggests, they were a little behind-the-times with this particular spoof (the show was off NBC's schedules by Summer '85) but, presumably, the UK editors still felt that the invaders were still sufficiently ingrained into the memories of British readers to shift a few copies.  

Knowing ITV's lacklustre approach to imports, it's entirely possible that episodes of the weekly series were still doing the regional rounds.  They were certainly dusted-off by many regions when ITV launched their overnight schedules late in the decade.

1987: SPEAKEASY FANZINE: MARVEL SOLD and SKINN QUITS QUALITY

Here is the Breaking News, albeit from January 1987!  New World Pictures have snaffled up Spidey and the rest of the Marvel Comics Group.

This was the lead story from British fanzine SPEAKEASY issue 70, cover-dated January 1987.

The prediction that the sale would have no effect on Marvel's staffers turned out to be wide-of-the-mark, Marvel's new owners didn't waste too much time in dispensing with the services of Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter.  But we'll get to that.

I've covered the post-Corman rise and fall of New World Pictures/ Entertainment in a previous post but, to cut a long story short: their core business of movies and television production lost shedloads of money, Marvel was sold-off to keep the wolf from the door and NWE eventually reinvented itself as a TV station group (with some production, including the GENERATION X tele-flick) before being absorbed by News Corporation (who wanted to add New World's local stations to their existing Fox station group) and ceasing to exist in any meaningful sense.

Marvel after New World had a turbulent 1990s, spent the first part of the noughies redefining itself and is now, of course, a lucrative part of the Disney empire.

The other front page story that issue was Dez Skinn's hasty departure from Quality Comics over - ironically - quality issues.  QC, and Skinn, had been making a splash in '86 having acquired the rights to repackage and reprint the 2000AD back catalogue (as well as other IPC archive strips) from Eagle Comics (the joint-venture between IPC and Titan Books).  Skinn had planned to use these low-cost (creators, notoriously, didn't receive extra payments for reprints or reuse of their work) reprints as the basis to grow the Quality line.

After his departure, Quality became notorious for poor production standards and sloppy reprints.  Numerous titles were released under the Quality/ Fleetway banner and, one day, I'll get around to featuring some of them here.

SPEAKEASY was a well-established British fanzine which, by this point, had positioned itself as the main "newspaper" for British comics fandom.  Taking this to it's logical conclusion, it had adopted a newsprint tabloid format, folded to A4 size for display and sale (which explains that nasty brown line through the news stories, that's where the fold is!).