Marvel’s output in the UK may have started in earnest with the release of the first issue of The Mighty World Of Marvel in October 1972, but this wasn’t the company’s earliest foray into the UK market. A number of UK publishers licensed material to publish in existing UK titles during the 60s, allowing Marvel to judge whether there could be a market here for their material in the future…
But the story actually dates back to the 50s when companies such as L.Miller & Sons (perhaps more famous nowadays for the creation of their Marvelman character when they lost the rights to reprint the US Captain Marvel series - and as Marvel actually bought the rights to the character a couple of years back, so you could say that Marvelman is Marvel’s earliest created UK superhero) and Thorpe & Porter published b&w reprints of some of the Marvel - or rather, Atlas as they were known at that time - titles of the period, mostly westerns….
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…but also the revived 1950s versions of Captain America, Sub-Mariner and Human Torch.
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Not that there would have been many issues of those, as Marvel’s 1950s superhero revival was a very short-lived affair! Even though the superhero range didn’t last, the westerns continued and later, a few of the much more successful early 1960s superhero strips appeared in some of Miller’s mystery titles.
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At the same time in the early 60s, Alan Class set up a series of anthology comics in a rather chunky 68-page format (namely Suspense, Sinister Tales, Creepy Worlds, Secrets of the Unknown, Uncanny Tales and Astounding Stories) which reprinted mystery, monster and sci-fi stories from a variety of US publishers. These great titles continued well into the 1980s and were a major part of my childhood, being readily available (and cheap!) in local newsagents…they were a treasure trove of b&w reprints of Atlas, Charlton, and many other companies strips; many of these titles also included superhero stories, although printed totally at random and if you happened to read part one of a two-part story there was no guarantee that the second part would appear in the next issue, or even anytime soon…he just stuck the words ‘The End’ in the final panel!
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Sorry about the large size of images in this post, I'll be looking to use thumbnail images linked to large images as the thread progresses. I simply haven't any smaller images to hand for these early issues at the moment, unfortunately.
Next post I'll be looking at Odhams Power Comics range from the late 60s before moving on to the 1970s British Marvel range.