Marvel In The UK

[MacNimon]

There's some lovely stuff here Kenny, thanks for doing all of this. I have to say I'm disappointed in "The Lizard" though - everyone else gets cool names, but his is just rubbish...

Out of interest, was 5p considered expensive back then? As in, what else could you buy for that sort of money? It's just that I look at comics now, and okay they're printed on better paper and the colouring looks amazing these days, but they still seem really overpriced to me.

I'm glad you're enjoying them, Alex...I've been having a great time reliving my childhood! These covers really are what eventually got me into all those great comics and magazines, tv, radio and films of later years, and thus into the worlds of cult tv & film fandom. This is really where it all began for me...MWOM issue 6, if you want to be exact. And I can assure you, the best is yet to come!

I've got 90% of the covers up until the end of Captain Britain vol 2 (1986) with only chunks of long-runners DWM and Spider-Man Weekly to get (with a few exceptions....some 80s stuff is very hard to find). So be patient, everything will appear in due course! The hardest part (not that it's hard...it's just a case of finding the time! I still seem to be in collecting mode at the moment though...) is organising them into roughly the order they were released in, week by week. Once I get a bit better organised you'll see more covers coming, more often.

And to answer your question, Alex, I'd say that around this time a packet of crisps would have cost around the 3p/4p mark, so several comics per week were easily in pocket money range for an 8 year old (I've got a feeling I got around 20/25p). MUCH better value than todays titles. Much cheaper looking too, mind you! But the covers were just so much better, colourful, exciting, and in the case of Dracula Lives (as you'll see later), so much more atmospheric than anything around these days.

[Stuart Wallis]

You could refloat the economy with £2.50 in those days...

[MacNimon]

Grey Hulk, Green Hulk, Red Hulk, and now Orange Hulk! "Jaffa Cake Smash!"

I remember that orange Hulk cover, Stuart. This isn't a scan of a discoloured cover, apparently they were all like that!

In this next batch of issues, Iron Man makes his first Marvel UK appearance in SMCW 50, with Spidey himself taking a page cut to accomodate him.

[MacNimon]

[MacNimon]

[Stephen Morgan]

There are some iconic covers there I think. The cover of Avengers 24 particularly, as it brings back a few nagging memories for me, that was a favourite cover for a while, nice to see it again.

[MacNimon]

I can remember buying most of these, although the first few Spider-Man ones don't ring a bell. Pocket money must have been stretched by then, or else they were just hard to find!

[MacNimon]

[MacNimon]

[MacNimon]

I've still got some of the above comics (and others - although admittedly some of them were bought in old comic shops or e-Bay!), I dug them out of the loft there just before my holidays. It's great looking at them again! I think I'd rather have copies of these rather than the US originals.

[Stephen Morgan]

I'd forgotten all about Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu (hugely in vogue for 1974), even though he appeared on most of The Avengers covers.
I did Notice the subtle price increase in the comics, from 5p to 6p to 7p in little under a year, had to cover the cost of all those glossy covers somhow I suppose.

[MacNimon]

I remember noticing those price rises at the time, Stephen, and not being too amused at how they were biting into my pocket money! As for Shang-Chi, I remember it being a bit of a shock seeing the Avengers relegated to the second feature in their own title. Shang-Chi took over the lead spot inside, as well as appearing on most of the covers. Marvel was obviously cashing in on the Kung-Fu craze of the time, weren't they? Shang-Chi was a recent addition to the ranks of Marvel's US characters though, and they weren't long in catching up with the US originals. He would be replaced by another recent martial arts hero, Iron Fist, and the two strips would soon go into rotation for a while depending on material avaiable to publish

Possibly spurred on by the success of the non-superhero Shang-Chi strip, another two new expansion titles were just around the corner now, neither of which would feature superheroes; one based on a popular sci-fi film series which had just spawned a tv series spin-off and the other being a horror anthology title...

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[Stephen Morgan]

... another two new expansion titles were just around the corner now, neither of which would feature superheroes; one based on a popular sci-fi film series which had just spawned a tv series spin-off and the other being a horror anthology title...

Ah! That'll be Planet of the Apes and Dracula Lives, which I'm not sure I collected even though I enjoyed the POTA TV series and loved the Dracula films, perhaps those particualr titles didn't appeal to me. Come to think about it I don't think Shang-Chi appealed to me either, I may not have been too impressed with him taking the honours away from The Avengers on all those covers, I probably felt the same way about the Iron Fist title too but loved the David Carradine Kung Fu series that was running on TV at that time.

[MacNimon]

Of course, you're totally right, Stephen. POTA and Dracula Lives made their first appearance in the week cover dated 26th October, 1974 alongside MWOM 108, SMCW 89, and Avengers 58. In other words, the next post!

[Stephen Morgan]

Uh!! I was just thinking how nice it was to see The Avengers back on the cover of their own mag when up pops Dr. Strange (the cover of 57 looks quite good) and then Iron Fist. Seems they took the decision to alternate the cover stars for a little while.
That Spiderman issue 85 was another shivers down the spine moment for me as I quite clearly remembered buying that one in Newport market in my attempt to get all the back issues,

[MacNimon]

Yes Stephen, The Avengers covers went onto a rota of sorts with each character/strip having their own cover appearance every few weeks.

This week, 26th October 1974, saw the release of Marvel's latest two weeklies which would further strengthen their position in the market. Not a superhero in sight with these two new comics, one being a science fiction comic - Planet Of The Apes - released to cash in on the tv series which was being shown on ITV at the time, and the other being a horror one, Dracula Lives.

Although these two titles went on to become two of the company's most popular titles over the next year or two, Marvel must have been aware at the outset that both titles would have a limited life-span. Dracula had only appeared for the first time in the US a couple of years earlier in 1972, with DL's back-up strips Werewolf By Night and the Frankenstein Monster even later; and POTA only appeared in the US earlier that same year (1974) so the material available to reprint was rather limited. POTA's cause was helped though by the fact that the American version was a 64-page magazine format monthly title, rather than the traditional smaller colour comic, and as such offered more than twice as much reprint material per issue; still, available material was limited and ingenuity would soon be called for.

In fact, POTA was actually the first Marvel UK title to reverse the reprint trend. It was such a huge success that they simply couldn't afford to cancel it once the reprint material had (very quickly!) ran out; series writer Doug Moench recalls regularly being asked to write short, one-issue filler stories to keep the UK title ticking over until the next batch of (US) material was avaiable for publication. In fact the UK title actually got ahead of the US one at one point, and much of the stuff published in the UK weekly was later reprinted in the US one. To stretch things even further, they even reprinted Marvel's Killraven/War Of The Worlds strip, renamed it Apeslayer and pasted Ape heads over the original Martian heads to make the material suit the title! They also made good use of material which had been edited out of the US version for reasons of space, but even so they couldn't keep it up forever...it still had a good two and a half year run though. As Doug Moench once said,"Britain just went Ape crazy!"

To expand on that a bit...although the British POTA weekly occasionally used material before its US counterpart, this wasn't a case of British content appearing in the title. That scenario was still several years in the future at that point. What happened was that, apart from letters pages, ads etc, the comic was produced over at Marvel HQ in America then shipped over here to be printed and distributed. Once the British weekly had caught up with reprint material, Marvel actually had two seperate production offices for POTA...one for the US version, and one for the UK version. Two copies of the source material were sent out at the same time, one to each office to do with as was required for their own edition. But the weekly production schedule of the British version necessitated a need for more material than the US version, hence Doug Moench having to provide extra stories etc which saw print in the UK first. A similar scenario would occur with the Shang-Chi strip in the Avengers, which was much more recent than the other material in that title.

The first issue of POTA was devoted to the first part of Marvel's adaptation of the film, with no back-up strips but a text article instead. Back-up strips from issue two onwards were (initially) Gullivar Jones, Warrior Of Mars and Ka-Zar, Lord Of The Savage Land. The Gullivar Jones series was an adaptation of a novel written in the early years of the 20th Century, and influenced Edgar Rice Burroughs in the creation of his later John Carter, Warlord of Mars series which was first published in 1912. There are certainly similarities between the two series.

Covers from 26th October - 16th November 1974

MWOM 108-110, SMCW 89-91, Avengers 58-60, Dracula Lives 1-3, POTA 1-3

[Stephen Morgan]

Most of the covers you've posted here have rung bells with me, some giving me nagging shivers down the spine moments. But those Apes and Dracula covers have done nothing for me at all so I really couldn't have bothered with them. Perhaps it was the 8p cover price that put me off them.

[MacNimon]

MWOM 111-113, SMCW 92-94, Avengers 61-63, Dracula Lives 4-6, POTA 4-6

[Stuart Wallis]

I got Dracula Lives # 1 in a job lot of magazines a number of years ago!

Kenny, do you know if the War of The Worlds strip is the one that was reprinted in the early DWWs?

[MacNimon]

No Stuart, it isn't. It's a sequel set in the future, an original mid-70s Marvel series which was briefly renamed Killraven - Warrior Of The Worlds. Here's a sample cover of the original series; as you'll see, it's easy to imagine them putting ape heads on that cover...replace those bad guys with apes, rename Killraven 'Apeslayer' and instantly add another 3 or 4 months life to a title quickly running out of material...

[MacNimon]

MWOM 114-116, SMCW 95-97, Avengers 64-66, Dracula Lives 7-9, POTA 7-9

[MacNimon]

MWOM 117-119, SMCW 98-100, Avengers 67-69, Dracula Lives 10-12, POTA 10-12

[Stephen Morgan]

Looking at those covers for the super hero comics has made me remember that it was late 1974 that the collecting bug really hit me regarding getting a full collection of them and I began in earnest to fill in some of the gaps, I'm still not sure if I have a full collection or not, but I know it was fun getting them.
1975 was a particularly memorable year, it was a hot summer and I remember reading alot of them out in the sunny and hot back garden of my home back then. Those 1975 covers are sure going to bring back some memories when you post them Kenny.

[MacNimon]

1975 was when Marvel UK peaked, Stephen. More titles added to the mix, and one cancellation; a title which, when later relaunched, became one of Marvel UK's longest running and most successful titles. Possibly they just tried to stretch themselves too thin; the single cancellation of 1975 was seen as a blip, but in 1976 - for various reasons - the range would really start to implode.

[Stephen Morgan]

...in 1976 - for various reasons - the range would really start to implode.

Yes, I remember. Wasn't it with the launch of "The Titans" they turned the comic on its side to get more panels per page. If I recall correctly Spiderman and one or two others went that way too for a little while before they turned them back the right way.