Be Our Guest Writer: Marvel UK!

Redartz:  Welcome everyone! Today is an auspicious day here at BitBA: our first guest post! And we're in for a real treat: a look at Marvel's UK line, courtesy of Steve Does Comics, Colin Bray and Colin Jones. Many thanks, gentlemen;  the floor is yours!

Steve Does Comics:  For companies founded upon the actions of heroes, Silver Age Marvel and DC were surprisingly timid when it came to foreign lands, preferring to license out their material to local publishers, rather than get directly involved.  In pre-1970s Britain, the reprint rights to Marvel’s tales therefore lay in the hands of Odhams and Alan Class.  Odhams used the material to fill weekly comics like Fantastic, Pow and Terrific, while Alan Class unleashed a plethora of quirky, undated comics mostly destined for sale at bus stations and railway stations to alleviate the boredom of children during lengthy journeys.

Odhams and Alan Class lead the charge to give UK kids US action!

While the Alan Class reprints could still be found loitering around the transport interchanges of Britain until the late 1980s, by 1972, Odhams’ weekly Marvel comics had gone the same way as Loki’s hopes of ever defeating his brother and, deciding there was now a gap in the market, Marvel decided it was time to launch a UK reprint mag of its own.

That mag was The Mighty World of Marvel and, with its tales of life in 1960s America for victims of radiation poisoning, and messages to the reader allegedly from Stan the Man himself, it was not like any other British comic.

But nor was it like an American comic, possessing non-glossy covers and, apart from very early issues, no interior colour. In its infancy, it didn’t even have staples to hold it together, so cheap was its production.

Readers clearly didn’t mind such austerity because, such was its success that, within just nineteen weeks, it spawned its own spin-off - Spider-Man Comics Weekly - which, as well as featuring everyone’s favourite wall-crawler, reprinted the adventures of everyone’s favourite thunder god. For a short spell, Daredevil took the web-spinner’s place in Mighty World of Marvel but can’t have been too popular because, after just weeks, he was dropped to make way for increased Hulk action.

In September 1973, breaking the world record for the greatest number of blurbs ever printed on one cover, The Avengers was launched.

The Avengers was different, not only did it give us the adventures of Marvel’s mightiest team, plus Ditko’s Dr. Strange but it came wrapped inside a fully glossy cover.

Clearly the time had come for Marvel UK to adopt a more American style because, months later, its sister mags were also granted glossy covers.

In the wake of this revolutionary move, Daredevil was once more added to the pages of Mighty World of Marvel, while Iron Man was added to Spider-Man Comics Weekly. Not to be left out, The Avengers also soon gained a third strip as, to cash in on the Kung Fu craze, Shang-Chi was added to the roster although, due to a shortage of reprint material, he soon found himself alternating with Iron Fist.

Clearly there was no stopping Marvel UK now and, flushed with success, in 1974, they launched another two mags, this time simultaneously, which meant that Planet of the Apes and Dracula Lives hit the news stands in the same week as each other.

Early the following year, the company launched The Super-Heroes and Savage Sword of Conan. It’s pretty self-explanatory who the latter of those titles featured. The Super-Heroes, meanwhile, featured the Silver Surfer and the Watcher but, once their stories were used up, it became a place to dump virtually every oddity Marvel had available, and so it gave us the adventures of the Cat, the original X-Men, Giant Man, Doc Savage, the Scarecrow, Bloodstone and just about anyone else who hadn’t been able to sustain a comic of their own in the States.

Marvel UK was now publishing seven titles a week and was starting to look like a genuine challenger to the established UK comics publishers.

But, just as the peak of the Roman Empire proved to be the moment at which it was about to tip over into decline, so it started to become clear that all was not well in Albion. The Savage Sword of Conan proved to be Marvel UK’s first flop, folding after just eighteen issues and merging with The Avengers to provide a magnificently strong comic.

This failure didn’t seem to deter Marvel UK and, later that year, they launched their most audacious venture yet – The Titans.

The Titans was a revelation - a comic printed the wrong way up. Some genius or madman at Marvel had realized that, thanks to the much larger page size of UK comics, if one was turned on its side, two pages of US material could be reprinted on one British page with not too crippling a reduction in print size needed.

Thus it was that we got a comic that featured not three but six strips every issue. The Titans initially gave us The Inhumans, S.H.I.E.L.D., Captain America, Sub-Mariner, and Captain Marvel but its line-up proved to be fluid in the extreme and it seemed at times like any strip could turn up in it at any moment.

The Titans unveiled! Two pages of artwork printed side-by-side on one horizontal page.

It is often claimed this format was unpopular but the fact that, mere months later, Spider-Man Comics Weekly also adopted it suggests it was seen as anything but a failure by the management.

At this point, Marvel UK seemed to have gone mad. They were reliant on reprints but, thanks to the weekly schedule, were often using up material at four times the rate that it had originally been published.  Having two comics featuring six strips a week was only exacerbating that problem, especially as the reformatted Spider-Man comic was ploughing its way though an entire Spider-Man tale every seven days.

But, months earlier, confronted with just this problem, Marvel UK had had a brainwave. Launched not long after its US counterparts, their Planet of the Apes comic had quickly run out of material to reuse. And so it was that their greatest and most magnificent burst of insanity had broken out. They got US Marvel’s Killraven strip and redrew and re-dialogued it in order to pass it off as a Planet of the Apes strip called Apeslayer. Thanks to desperation, the company had created its very first super-hero.

Marvel UK's first hero! Killraven Apeslayer!

In 1976, it created its second super-hero.

That hero was Captain Britain and he was not a triumph. Written and drawn by people with little knowledge of the UK, the strip seemed a strange thing indeed to British readers and failed to catch light. Apart from its somewhat misguided appeal to patriotism, the mag’s main selling point was that it was printed in colour, sacrificing the glossy covers in order to make it financially viable. When this didn’t work, after six months, the colour was dropped and glossy covers were introduced to bring it in line with its sister comics.

Sadly, the move proved futile and, after roughly a year, the mag folded and merged with Spider-Man’s book which had now returned to its original portrait format.

Marvel UK was now well and truly on the ropes. The launch of a British style war comic - Fury - had proven to be a major misstep and it folded after just six months. 

Other titles too were faltering, with The Avengers having merged with Mighty World of Marvel. Dracula Lives merged with Planet of the Apes which later merged with Mighty World of Marvel, not too long before Fury also merged with it. This meant that Mighty World of Marvel was now technically The Mighty World of Marvel with Planet of the Apes and Dracula Lives and The Avengers and Savage Sword of Conan and Fury. Mercifully, this wasn’t the official title. The Titans, meanwhile, had merged with Spider-Man’s title which had already previously merged with The Super-Heroes.

Mergers mergers mergers.

Still, even in this face of this clear decline, Marvel UK carried on launching new titles, giving us The Complete Fantastic Four and also unleashing Rampage starring the Defenders and Nova.

Neither of these titles proved to be successes. The Complete Fantastic Four soon folded, while Rampage took a path that proved far more intriguing. Instead of folding, it went monthly, with a drastically increased page count and a format modelled on the US Marvel black and white mags. In this format, Savage Sword of Conan was also re-launched, this time proving to be far more successful than it had been earlier. By this means, Marvel UK could appeal to a more mature reader and charge a higher cover price.

Marvel UK tries monthly and Conan gets a new lease of life.

But if there was hope in the monthly market, things were increasingly grim on the weekly front, with falling sales and sliding profits. If, as is often claimed, the launch of a Star Wars comic had saved US Marvel, it was increasingly clear that, on the weekly front, it was only Marvel UK’s own Star Wars comic that was staving off financial ruin on the other side of the Atlantic. At one point, Marvel UK was offered for sale to British publishing rivals IPC who saw no value in the brand and spurned the offer.

To solve this problem, in 1978, Dez Skinn was brought in. Skinn had launched an award winning sci-fi mag – Starburst – and also House of Hammer. The success of these projects convinced Stan Lee that Skinn was his British counterpart and thus Skinn was put in charge.

Results were mixed. Skinn decided to revamp the weekly comics to make them feel like British comics, scrapping the glossy covers and cramming an overly ambitious six strips into each mag, meaning that each strip had only four or five pages, making it a disjointed and frustrating read.

The Dez Skinn revolution. Mighty World of Marvel becomes Marvel Comic.

There was also the problem that the vast majority of Marvel’s best material had already been reprinted, meaning the weekly books were increasingly dependent on strips like She-Hulk, Spider-Woman, Miss Marvel, Godzilla and even Ant-Man. For long-term readers, the drop off in quality felt like a terrible betrayal and many lost interest.

The one bright spot amongst this weekly woefulness was that Skinn brought in UK creators to produce material for the venture, with the likes of the Hulk and SHIELD now being drawn and written by Brits. While this was clearly a good thing for the development of local talent, it was a strange thing to read, especially the Hulk strip which was now a baffling compromise between the TV version of the character and the original comic book incarnation.

The monthly mags however flourished and did so to such a degree that, through them, Captain Britain was revived, brought back by Alans Moore and Davis. This strip was arguably Bronze Age Marvel UK’s finest achievement.

Despite its decline, Marvel UK never really went away, spending most of the mid-to-late 1980s producing a seemingly random list of forgettable licensed material. In the early 1990s, they had a revival, taking advantage of the speculator boom and the direct market to launch a bucketful of new titles, including Death’s Head II, Motormouth, Warheads and Killpower which proved popular in America and created the illusion for a while that they were now bigger players than they’d ever been before.

Sadly, financial instability and then the mid-1990s collapse of the US comic book market saw Marvel UK snapped up by Panini who still own the franchise and, amazingly, after all these twists and turns, the company’s 1972 flagship title Mighty World of Marvel is still published to this day, still reprinting old material and still showing no signs of going away.

The comic that refused to die. Mighty World of Marvel, March 2017.

In the end, the 1970s incarnation of Marvel UK was always a doomed venture, the increasing availability of US Marvel comics in Britain made the UK versions increasingly redundant and the weekly schedule gobbling up material had guaranteed it was a project with a limited lifespan but it was fun while it lasted and enabled an entire generation of readers to catch up with almost all of Marvel’s entire history, in just a few short years. For that reason, it’s fondly remembered by those who experienced it.

Colin Jones: I discovered Marvel UK in November 1974 thanks to the Planet Of The Apes TV show which had debuted on British screens just a month earlier and of which I was an instant fan.

Unknown to me Marvel UK's POTA weekly had been launched just six days after the TV show and when I saw #5 on sale, I had to have it.

It wasn't quite what I'd expected, as the apes story had nothing to do with my beloved characters from the TV show but I was hooked anyway and inside the comic there were ads for Marvel UK's other weeklies. It was a whole new world and soon I was reading Spider-Man Comics Weekly and Dracula Lives.

For the next few years I was a devoted fan of Marvel UK, trying every new weekly and I was especially thrilled about the launch of Captain Britain, our own superhero!

But, as Steve says, things went slowly downhill and, in January 1979, there were big changes to the UK weeklies, which I found totally alienating and I started turning to the imported American Marvel comics that were becoming much easier to find.

I continued reading the UK monthlies for a while but, by 1981, I had completely abandoned Marvel UK.

However, it was great fun while it lasted and I am eternally grateful that Marvel UK existed, as I cannot imagine my childhood without Marvel comics.

*

Colin Bray: Thanks for the education Steve!

Bronze Age comics produced by Marvel UK feel both intimately close and strangely distant. As regular BITBA readers may know, it is the sheer ‘American-ness’ of cent copies that holds a special place in my heart. And yet, Marvel UK published comics that were everywhere in the Bronze Age – a little cheaper than the originals, constantly on tap, due to the weekly publishing schedule, and full of letters from *gasp* children like me. The letters even came from places I had visited, such as Uxbridge and Slough!

Picking up UK Marvel back issues since, it’s the distinctiveness that stands out.

ITEM! They look different - as Steve says, for the most part they were published in black and white.

ITEM! They feel different - larger in the hand than the originals, they sometimes bravely ventured into the side-on format or were published as digests.

ITEM! They smell different - presumably due to the cheaper paper stock used this side of the pond.

ITEM! They host occasional competitions – usually parading bland UK-in-the-70s prizes. The exception was Marvel Mastermind of 1976 winner Mark Haynes, who won the original Jack Kirby drawing reproduced further down this page.

ITEM! They include quirky content unique to the UK such as a cut-out-and-keep 1975 calendar.

ITEM! Comic swap pages such as this: “I have: Marvel Annual 1974 (UK), Ghost Rider number 4 (US) and Ka-Zar number 7 (US). I wish to swap these for: 2 US Silver Surfers, US Fantastic Four 148-49, US Iron Man 70, US Defenders 14, US Captain America 180, US Luke Cage 19-20 and 2 US Spider-Man comics.” Good work Paul Dubell of Bolton, Lancashire.

ITEM! Reader’s jokes: “Any fish in this place?” Man behind counter (looking strangely like The Sub-Mariner) “Sorry, Namor in stock.” Name withheld here to protect the guilty.

ITEM! And yet, Marvel UK mimicked just enough of the originals to remain credible. Yes, they did indeed use ITEM!

I now realize UK readers were spoilt during the Bronze Age. With luck we could find a regular supplier of current American issues. And with more luck we had enough pocket money to buy them. But at the same time we had access to the entirety of the Marvel Age of Comics via Marvel UK. And that definitely made its mark on our generation.

Two legends meet!

Three legends meet!

Make your own action scene.

There are three inevitabilities in life. Death, taxes and Stan's Soapbox.