Cover Of The Day

[Alex]

I'm afraid I'm not a big fan of McMahon either, his Slaine was always a little cartoonish for my liking and I much preferred Simon Bisley's work on the series.

Out of interest, has anyone ever read the 2000AD fanzine Zarjaz*? I've only read the one issue so far, as a friend had a Zenith/Invasion crossover story printed in it, but I was impressed by the overall quality, with some stories being much more fun than their 2000AD versions are these days.

*http://thequaequamblog.blogspot.co.uk/ / A free strip from it entitled "Constable Dredd" - http://2000ad.wordpress.com/2013/07/...nstable-dredd/

[MacNimon]

I'll give myself a nice easy post today after my rather lengthy ones of the past few days. So today it's one of those comics which I've never managed to track down a copy of myself yet, but it would be interesting to see...DC's 1985 spin-off from the tv series V which lasted 18 issues. It's one of those largely forgotten titles which doesn't get much attention these days but here's what Wiki has to say about it...

DC Comics published an 18-issue V comic book series from February 1985 – July 1986, with stories set to be concurrent with the events of V: The Series. The editor of the comic reported at one point in the letter (fan mail) column that DC was working to acquire permission to continue the storyline of the television series should it not be renewed for a second season. In the end, either such permission was denied or DC decided not to pursue the matter further.The cover of the 18th issue did state "Final Issue", but actually featured (with issue 17) a flashback story featuring Elias Taylor. (Issue 16 led into the opening scene of the final television episode).

[Jonno]

I loved V - well, the miniseries in particular, the series starting off well but losing its way, especially once Tyler left. However, I have to say that the only half recognisable character on the cover there is Julie!

[MacNimon]

Back to the 50s today, and a short-lived, largely forgotten, digest-sized picture library in the same format as Commando, Air Ace, Starblazer etc. and gives us a chance to enjoy some great pulp art from the period by Ron Turner, who is probably best known round these parts as the artist on about 50 installments of the 1960s Daleks comic strip from TV21.

Turner grew up with a love of pulp writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, HG Wells etc and his first work in the sci-fi/fantasy field was for Odhams, who published a line of science fiction paperbacks for which Turner drew many covers, notably the Vargo Statten series by John Russell Fearn. Turner's art raised his profile and soon other publishers started to send him assignments. In 1953, Turner left Odhams to try his hand at freelancing and attempt to produce a regular comic strip in the style of British artist Frank Hampson, whose work he admired. Titbits Science Fiction Library ran for 6 monthly issues in 1953, and was a 64-page comic book written, drawn and lettered by Turner. The workload quickly became too much though and the comic was discontinued after 6 issues. Turner went on to work on series such as Star Trek and Judge Dredd, and returned to The Daleks for DWM in the 90s.

[Jonno]

It's a wonderful B-movie type piece of artwork - and the rocket is straight out of Quatermass! 60 years ago though - wow!

[MacNimon]

I love the artwork on old covers like these, Jonno...as you say, it's a B-movie type of art...certainly dated, but in a way that's so obviously 1950s. I'm not at all familiar with the contents of any of these small comics though, just the covers!

I'm pretty sure I'll squeeze in a few others in a similar vein, occasionally...

[MacNimon]

After last weeks look at British Marvel covers, I think it's about time we looked at some of DCs attempts to crack the British market. They certainly didn't have the same success as Marvel did over the years, with most of their comics being short-lived affars. Such as this weekly from 1991...

DC Heroes lasted a meagre 8 issues in early 1991 before quietly disappearing from the shelves and reprinted material from The Brave And The Bold (team-up title, allowing for Batman stories without any complicated continuity issues), The Legion Of Superheroes and Blue Devil.

[Rob McCow]

Nobody in the UK took Batman seriously in the 80's, what with the Adam West TV show being repeated throughout the school holidays. Now if they'd done a 60's style tie-in comic, that might have had a bit more success. But then again, maybe not.

[MacNimon]

It's been a while since we had a Look-In cover. So today we have the last issue from 1979 featuring Captain Kirk & co to tie in with the release of Star Trek TMP at cinemas around the country.

I wonder if the issue number on the cover is a misprint...I always thought they started the first issue of each new year with a new #1, so this should have been 1979 #52?

[Rob McCow]

Of those, we've still got new Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica (well, a few years back anyway), Charlie's Angels got revived and The Smurfs are hitting the big screen for a second outing.

Oh and I believe Bolton still exists, though many believed they cancelled it in the early 80's.

[MacNimon]

Today I'm making one of my occasional side-steps into world of cult paperback books and ask the question, when is a comic not a comic? When it's a Photonovel (or Fotonovel)...

Does anyone else remember any of these little gems? In the pre-video age, these were the closest thing you could get to experiencing a film or episode of a tv series in your own home at your own convenience rather than depending on a tv schedule or cionema trip. They weren't particularly widespread athough they were really popular for a short time and soon fell out of fashion at the onset of the video age...

I'm going to have a closer look today at one particular set of 12, a staple of my childhood. I never had a complete set but I certainly owned 7 or 8 of them back in the day...

For those unaware of these forgotten classics, what they did was take a carefully selected 300 or so images from an episode and add speech bubbles (original dialogue as spoken on tv) and captions as if it was a comic adaptation. All in a small, traditional sized paperback book which could easily fit in your pocket. Below are a few examples from different editions/stories...

Gene Rodenberry, Robert Altman and other briefly discuss the Fotonovels here

RODDENBERRY: Whitfield was on the set or whatever his real name was…

SCOTT MANTZ (chief film critic, Access Hollywood): Steven Edward Poe.

ALTMAN: And, of course, you had Franz Joseph’s seminal “Technical Manual” and the “Star Trek Blueeprints,” where you learned their was a bowling alley on the Enterprise which is just incredible in their specificity and the packaging as well. And then David Gerrold did a really interesting book about the making of “The Trouble of Tribbles,” which was an entire book just about writing that one episode, which also re-printed the script.

MANTZ: I got that book at the same time I got Fotonovel Number Nine, which is…

BRAGA: Oh, remember the Fotonovels?!?

ALTMAN: We could do a whole discussion just on Fotonovels. Now, this may be before your time, Rod, but before VHS, you had to wait for re-runs or you went into a movie theater with a cassette recorder and taped the movie or you got these Fotonovels which were basically stills from the show with word balloons.

MANTZ: “A Piece of the Action” was number eight. “Devil in the Dark” was nine. One was “City.” Two was “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Three was “Trouble With Tribbles.” Four was “A Taste of Armageddon.” Five was “Metamorphosis.” Six was…

GOODMAN: How many are there?

MANTZ: There are only 12. Number 11 was “The Deadly Years.” And 12 was “Amok Time.”

ALTMAN: I don’t know if that’s impressive or pathetic that you know that. [laughter]. The Fotonovel is an interesting phenomenon. It was the bridge between sort of a certain era and the dawn of VHS.

GOODMAN: But it also spoke to what I think separated Star Trek fans from other TV fans which is that we really wanted to watch those things over and over and there was a way in which, too, that I think there was something, again, about what Rod’s dad created and the writers he worked with. They created this — they didn’t fill in all the blanks. You wanted to know all the details that weren’t even in the shows. You would always re-watch the episodes, looking for more details, and trying to fill in the blanks of this world they created, and I think that’s what led to people wearing costumes and really just participating. It’s similar to Sherlock Holmes fans, who do the same thing, I think. Michael Chabon wrote a great essay about this and that popular fiction does this thing where it creates this world, and it doesn’t fill in the blanks, and that means that the fans want to. And that creates websites and that creates fanzines, like when we were kids, self-published stories. We wanted to participate. And there was some way in which Star Trek really I think was the first television series really to do that.

Fotonovels were great, certainly they were a product of the time but without any easy access to tv or film archives they were your only way of revisiting a favourite story whenever you wanted. It's unlikely there would be a market for them today given how easily available episodes are, available on dvd and blu-ray, but I'd certainly recommend checking a few out if you ever get the opportunity. There are some available on Amazon for under a pound, with prices rising pretty steeply for some of the more collectible editions.

[MacNimon]

In fact, I've just came across this image of the full set...

Larger images are available at Memory Alpha if anyone's interested in finding out more.

[Alex]

They look really cool - I was aware of photostrips in comics (mainly due to Eagle) but never knew they'd published photonovels, they look a lot of fun, and would have been something I'd loved to have owned when I was younger and didn't have a video.

[MacNimon]

They look really cool - I was aware of photostrips in comics (mainly due to Eagle) but never knew they'd published photonovels, they look a lot of fun, and would have been something I'd loved to have owned when I was younger and didn't have a video.

They were a lot of fun! In fact, just out of sheer nostalgia I've just sent away for a couple of them from Amazon (from the cheap end of the scale - there's no way was I going to pay up to £30 for them!) I'm looking forward to reading some of these again!

Today though is another rarity from 1978...

This is one which slipped through the net, somehow. One of only two titles ever published in the UK featuring Marvel material, but not published by Marvel UK themselves, during the entire history of the British arm of the company. This monthly magazine-style comic featured the sort of material which had previously featured in the weekly Dracula Lives horror weekly a few years earlier...it reprinted material from Marvel's B&W magazines such as Vampire Tales and Tales Of The Zombie. It was published, though, by a publisher called Portman Distribution who did a licensing deal directly with Marvel in the US, without the British arm of the company even being aware of it until several issues had already been published and on sale around the country. When they eventually did become aware of it, the deal was soon cancelled and this title would disappear after only 5 issues. Strangely enough, Marvel UK made no attempt to even try to replace this with anything similar at the time, and it would be a few years until they tried their hand at a horror title again with the Chiller Pocket Book...

[MacNimon]

Another one-off today...the only time that Marvel ever reprinted DC superheroes here in the UK. The 1985 Super Powers Annual was based on a DC characters toy line, with the lead-off strip featuring the first part of a tie-in mini-series. The other strips in the annual reprinted material from DC's Superman and Batman team-up titles, DC Comics Presents and The Brave And The Bold which allowed for appearances from Green Lantern and Hawkman.

If you look at the small print at the bottom of that first page, you'll see that rarely seen line "Published by Marvel Comics...Copyright DC"

This annual was a one-off with poor distribution with no regular weekly/monthly comic spinning off from it, and as such has become one of the hardest Marvel UK items to find. If anyone has a copy, it might actually be worth a bit!

[Rob McCow]

Hmm. That annual might not be worth much because it doesn't look very good!

The Star Trek Fotonovels are amazing though. I was never a huge Trek fan as a kid, but I'm sure I would have been if I'd had these!

[Stuart Wallis]

Today though is another rarity from 1978...

Scantily-clad redhead - good, good! Pity the rest of my family got there first...

[MacNimon]

Hmm. That annual might not be worth much because it doesn't look very good!

Who ever said that something actually had to be any good to be worth something?!

I've got to agree though, it doesn't look that great and I certainly wouldn't have bought it myself based on that cover! It was still worth the mention though, simply because of the Marvel publishing DC characters angle. Which in itself brings to mind something which was seriously considered in the early 80s...I'll try to get some links to that though before commenting further.

[MacNimon]

No cover today, but following on from my comment yesterday here are a few links to former Marvel Editor-In-Chief Jim Shooter's blog, showing just how close a Marvel takeover of DC actually was, before the 'suits' stopped it because they reckoned DC was in such a bad state at the time and it would end up costing Marvel a fortune. All this was going on around the same time (or shortly after) that yesterdays annual appeared in the UK. Coincidence? Probably, but an interesting one...

SUPERMAN – First Marvel Issue Part 1

SUPERMAN – First Marvel Issue!

Sometime in February, 1984, my secretary (it was okay to say “secretary” in those days) the wonderful Lynn Cohen told me that Bill Sarnoff was on the phone. Not his secretary, Bill Sarnoff himself, holding for me.

Great Scott!

Bill Sarnoff was the Big Cheese, I forget his exact title, of the publishing arm of Warner Communications. Among the operations under his purview was DC Comics.

Bill introduced himself, as if that was necessary. What he wanted to talk about was licensing the publishing rights for all DC characters to Marvel Comics.

Holy hegemony, Billman!

Bill said, more or less, that Marvel seemed to be able to turn a substantial profit on publishing comics, as opposed to DC, which consistently lost money, a lot of money, and had for a long time. On the other hand, LCA (Licensing Corporation of America), Warner’s licensing arm did very well with the DC properties, while Marvel “didn’t seem to do much licensing.”

I guess the few million a year we made from licensing, mostly from Spider-Man, seemed paltry to him, what with the fortune that just their big four, Superman, Batman, Robin and Wonder Woman brought in.

I told him I thought Marvel would be very interested...

Anyway, things got advanced enough for John Byre to submit a proposed plot for the first Marvel issue of Superman...

SUPERMAN – First Marvel Issue Part 2

So that's it. How things might have turned out, but it wasn't to be. I wonder how the comics landscape would be today if these proposals had gone through?

Lastly, here's a final link connected to this story, which is simply readers commenting on Shooters posts.

Comments

[MacNimon]

It's been a while since I've featured humour comics in this thread, so I'll look at least a couple of them this week. Today is another that Jonno mentioned, School Fun, which was another one of those fondly-remembered (by those who read it!) but short-lived comics from IPC. It ran for 33 issues from October 1983 - May 1984, when it was merged into Buster. Here's the cover for the first issue, later issues are notable for their wrap-around covers, some of which can be found here.

Conceived by comic writer and teacher Graham Exton, School Fun focused on strips about schools. As Exton later said on 26Pigs,

I pitched this to Bob Paynter in the early 80's to coincide with the beginning of my teaching career. I picked the brains of a lot of Cannock kids to see what they'd like in a comic, and groups of them produced their own comics as class projects. The result was nothing like any of us envisaged, being another Whoopee - alike, but it must have been a thrill for the children to see some semblance of their own ideas in print. I'm glad someone enjoyed it. It didn't last long enough to get going, really.

School Fun featured a strip based on the popular kids school soap, Grange Hill, called Grange Hill Juniors. Other strips included:

Softy Sir (a wimpy teacher who always managed to come out on top. After the merge, "Softy Sir" was teaching)

Coronation Street School (a class where the pupils resembled popular Coronation Street characters)

Creepy Crawler (a tell-tale teachers pet)

Time Bus (which took its school pupils back in time. The time trips include making the Tower of Pisa lean; the pupils helping out their teacher when he was their age, and bringing Christmas joy to their school when it was a workhouse.)

Walt Teaser ( Walt was always finding somebody to tease, but his victims always end up having the last laugh.)

B.Ware Caretaker (trying to prevent schoolchildren's fun)

The School Team (of Chumpion School, a school which has never won anything. The school team are to fill the school cabinet with trophies and somehow or other, they always bring back a trophy.)

E.T.T. (based on the movie ET...an alien teacher stranded on Earth)


Teachers United (conspiring against schoolkids)

Schoolditz (was about a schooltrip to Nazi Germany. When the war breaks out, the pupils, headmaster and teachers become trapped and they are imprisoned in a fortress. Lessons soon become a cover for an escape committee. The plans usually founder because the headmaster keeps putting his foot in it)

Young Arfur (a schoolboy who you could always count on to find a dodge out of schoolwork)

School Belle (Belle holds the record for longest-running School Fun character. She was still going strong, even years after the merge with Buster. Belle, of course, was the school glamour-puss. She was always surrounded by drooling hunks, the geeky Nerks, and her jealous rival, Grotty Glenda, was always scheming to get one over Belle)

[Jonno]

Thanks for posting, Kenny - I was curious about it having seen the advert for that first issue in 2000AD but I can't say I do recall it now! Schoolditz sounds fun - you just wouldn't see that now I'm sure for fear of upsetting the PC brigade!

[MacNimon]

I've never read this one myself, so I've got no idea of the quality. However, it sounds like fun, doesn't it? And if you think that would upset the PC brigade, wait till you see the cover star (and title character) I've got lined up for later in the week! If he was too offensive for a 1970s audience, I dread to think what they'd say if he appeared today...

[Alex]

Blimey, I never knew that DC were in such dire straits in the 80s, or that it got so close to Marvel taking them over, or at the very least publishing their big titles. I'm glad it didn't happen as I have a feeling we'd never have seen minor characters like Blue Beetle, Animal Man or Booster Gold ever again, and I was very fond of DC's Suggested For Mature Readers / Vertigo range as well, which I can't imagine Marvel ever publishing.

The weird thing for me is that despite being a "DC Kid" from my early teens to early thirties, I do find myself now preferring the Marvel characters. Partially due to the "Ultimate" range, but also the many superb movies, whilst at the same time DC launched the (at least for me) disastrous New 52 universe, which bar a couple of titles (Snyder's Batman, Lemire's Animal Man mainly) I really haven't got on with. And don't even get me started on the new version of John Constantine...

[MacNimon]

I haven't been familiar enough with the 'modern-era' DC Universe to complain too much about the New 52, (the Silver Age one which was rebooted in the mid 80s is the one I'm most familiar with!) but I disagree in principle with the wholesale rebooting of the DC Universe. They would have been much better just drawing a line under things, and giving us a new start where new/lapsed readers could jump on without too much continuity. Marvel did this much better last year imo, giving us jumping on points by taking characters in new directions without wiping out their history. Having said that, I'm enjoying seeing the Batgirl of my youth, Barbara Gordon, again and am enjoying Batwoman, Batman, Detective and Aquaman. I liked what I saw of Animal Man and Swamp Thing but just haven't time to keep up with them all, along with other stuff.

We're heading back to the 60s today, with another TV-based comic. One of the shorter-lived ones this time, a comic which may have been long forgotten but not so the series featured within it. Joe 90, Top Secret was based on the Gerry Anderson tv series and also featured strips based on Land Of The Giants, The Champions and Star Trek. It ran for only 34 issues, from January - September 1969, when it was merged into TV Century 21 creating a new renumbered and retitled volume of that comic (which looked very different to its early editions, featured earlier in this thread), and which will feature here shortly.

This cover is notable for being the first Star Trek comic cover published in the UK, coming just a week or so after the series made its first appearance on British tv screens (BBC1, 5.15pm 12 July 1969: Where No Man Has Gone Before). This issue was cover dated 26th July, so it likely went on sale around the 19th or so. What is more interesting is that the strip wasn't making its first appearance here, it had actually been a regular feature since the very first issue way back in January 1969, meaning that the UK comic strip version of Star Trek appeared a good six months before the series ever appeared on UK tv. (A useless bit of trivia there for you! ) And yes, this was a UK produced original strip, not a reprint of any material which may have appeared in America; the strip itself went on to become the cover feature of TV21 after the merger and would run for a number of years.

[Rob McCow]

Very unusual to see the Enterprise at that angle! Looks to me like it was taken from a pic that should have been shown the other way round - of course, there is no 'Up' in space...