Marvel UK: Британдық комикстер тарихы және тоқтатылуы

Imprint of Marvel Comics that has become defunct since 1995

Marvel UK was an imprint of Marvel Comics formed in 1972 to reprint US produced stories for the British weekly comic market. Marvel UK later produced original material by British creators such as Alan Moore, John Wagner, Dave Gibbons, Steve Dillon, and Grant Morrison. There were a number of editors in charge of overseeing the UK editions. Although based in the United States, Tony Isabella oversaw the establishment of Marvel UK. He was succeeded by UK based editors Peter L. Skingley (a. k. a. Peter Allan) and then Matt Softly – both of whom were women who adopted male pen names for the job (in reality, they were Petra Skingley and Maureen Softly). Panini Comics obtained the license to print Marvel material in 1995 and took over the UK office's remaining titles.

After World War II, the UK was intent on promoting homegrown publishers, and thus banned the direct importation of American periodicals, including comic books; that ban was lifted in 1959. The British company Thorpe & Porter became the sole UK distributor of both DC and Marvel comics. Thus it was that in the early 1960s brand new American printed copies of Fantastic Four #1, Amazing Fantasy #15, and countless others appeared in the UK. Alan Class Comics also reprinted select Marvel superhero stories during this period. Thorpe & Porter, however, went bankrupt in 1966 (although IPC released a Marvel Annual, featuring Marvel superhero reprints, in autumn 1972).

In 1972, seeing a gap in the popular weekly comics market of the UK, Marvel Comics formed their own British publishing arm, Marvel UK (under the corporate name of Magazine Management London Ltd.). Though publishing comics in the UK for a British audience, Marvel UK was under the editorial direction of Marvel's New York offices, overseen by the then 21 year old American writer/editor Tony Isabella. The Mighty World Of Marvel, in one form or another, was published continuously until 1984, while the Spider Man weekly comic (under many different name changes) would continue until 1985.

In 1973, the US based editor Isabella was replaced by the UK based Petra Skingley (credited in the comics as "Peter L. Skingley" and "Peter Allan.") However, with the exception of some new covers drawn by Marvel Comics' American staff, no original material had yet been produced by Marvel UK. Tenant left in 1977 and was replaced by Nick Laing. In early 1978, Laing oversaw the launch of Marvel UK's Star Wars Weekly title, soon after the film was released in the UK. The weekly issues split the stories from the US monthly issues into smaller installments, and it usually took three weekly issues to complete a US monthly issue. In May 1980 the title became known as The Empire Strikes Back Weekly, and in November 1980 it transformed into a monthly publication. Marvel UK's Star Wars comic also published original Star Wars stories by British creators as well as reprinting the US comics material. Many, but not all, of these original British stories were reprinted in the 1990s by Dark Horse Comics. The format changed back to a weekly in June 1983 with the adaptation of Return of the Jedi (which also became the new name of the publication), and remained so until its last issue in 1986. Prior to the Return of the Jedi comic, the strips in the UK Star Wars comics were printed in black and white, even those taken from the American color versions. The UK comics also reprinted several other supporting strips in each issue from other Marvel properties (such as The Micronauts, Tales of the Watcher, Star Lord, etc.). While the comic was in a weekly format, the supporting strips often made up the bulk of each issue.

By the late 1970s, sales of Marvel UK titles had begun to fall and it was on a visit to the UK that Stan Lee headhunted Dez Skinn to revamp the ailing company. Knowing Skinn had significant experience in British comic publishing, Lee gave him the freedom to do what he felt best. Skinn had his own catchphrase in "Dez Sez," which was inspired by Lee's catchphrases from the 1960s. Skinn set out to change Marvel UK as he saw fit, dubbing the changes "The Marvel Revolution". Many of these creators had already worked with Skinn on his title The House of Hammer a few years earlier, plus some new young talent. Skinn wrote: "[T]raditional British comics were at the time selling 150,000+ a week, firm sale, no returns. If Marvel and Spider Man could look British enough for some of that to rub off, everybody would be happy  But fixing the covers to resemble the non glossy generic look of weekly anthology titles was one thing  Having "splash" pages and then five or six frames a page just didn't stack up against Warlord, Action, Battle, and the rest with their nine to 12 a page." So the US artwork was re sized to fit several pages onto one and emulate the look of the more established UK boys' weeklies. Skinn reasoned that Marvel superhero weeklies had been effectively competing with each other in an already crowded market. So while the Spider Man Comic was to be the flagship superhero comic (with Thor, Iron Man, Avengers, Fantastic Four, and Nova), The Mighty World of Marvel was re launched as Marvel Comic, in the tradition of UK boys' adventure titles. Dracula, Conan the Barbarian, and Skull the Slayer joined (or re joined) established strips Daredevil and Hulk (although the Hulk was replaced three issues after the re launch by Godzilla, as the Hulk left for his own title). Originally produced stories were included, such as Nick Fury drawn by Steve Dillon, and Night Raven by Steve Parkhouse and David Lloyd. Also included was the Black Knight, a Marvel character revamped to take in Arthurian concepts, as well as feature the return of Captain Britain from comic book limbo. As well there was the usual US reprint material, such as Ant Man and in later issues the Beast from Amazing Adventures, and even The Defenders were moved in from Rampage Monthly to increase the dose of Hulk action (a house ad showed a stern doctor holding out a handful of pills and saying, "Boredom is a sickness and there's only one cure. More Hulk action!!!"). Arguably Skinn's most important decision was to launch Doctor Who Weekly in 1979. Based on the BBC TV series (which at that point had already been running for 16 years), Doctor Who Weekly featured original comics stories by John Wagner, Pat Mills, and Dave Gibbons, among many others, plus articles and features on the show itself. It proved a huge success, and by now Skinn had transformed Marvel UK back to being a major publisher of not just weekly comics but monthly titles such as Starburst. Starburst had been created by Skinn before he joined Marvel UK, but was purchased by Marvel when he joined the company. (eventually forming Quality Communications in 1982).

In March 1980, as part of the "Marvel Revolution," Skinn launched the Marvel Pocket Books line with four 52 page titles. The line began with Spider Man, the Fantastic Four, Star Heroes (featuring TV tie in Battlestar Galactica and the toy based strip the Micronauts continued from their previous run in Star Wars Weekly), and Chiller (starring Dracula and the Man Thing with occasional appearance from other horror related characters). Following Skinn's belief that much of Marvel's strongest material was that published in the 1960s and early 70s, many of these titles showcased strips from that period. Skinn drew on the design of the traditional UK Picture Library titles (such as Thriller Picture Library and War Picture Library), which boomed in the 1960s, to establish a definitive look for the Pocket Books. Skinn wrote that they "emulated the look in their Combat Picture Library covers  that was the look I wanted, to pull the line of pocket books together visually and make them different to any of our other titles  "

The first four titles were later joined by Hulk, The Titans (reprinting the 1960s stories of Captain America, Thor and Iron Man), Marvel Classics Comics (featuring comic book adaptations of classic literature), Conan, and Young Romance. Some titles were not a success in terms of sales: Hulk, Conan, The Titans, Marvel Classics Comics, and Young Romance were cancelled after 13 issues, while Star Heroes (which had replaced The Micronauts with the original X Men from issue #10) was re launched as X Men Pocket Book from #14. All other Pocket Books were cancelled after issue 28 in July/August 1982. The Hulk strips continued in a newly launched The Incredible Hulk Weekly and similarly the classic Fantastic Four strips resurfaced in a weekly title in October 1982. Both of these eventually folded into Spider Man, where the strips continued on and off until it changed into The Spider Man Comic, aimed at younger readers. The classic Spider Man material continued in the first few issues of The Daredevils.

In September 1981 Captain Britain got his own strip in the pages of Marvel Superheroes (the by then then firmly established monthly version of The Mighty World Of Marvel/Marvel Comic), as written by Dave Thorpe and drawn by Alan Davis. (Thorpe left in 1982, to be replaced by Alan Moore in one of Moore's first major ongoing strips.) In October 1981, inspired by the success of its Doctor Who title, Marvel UK began publishing a monthly Blake's 7 title, initially edited by Stewart Wales. However, as the television series itself went off the air in late 1981, the magazine itself lasted less than two years. Despite a flurry of new weeklies post Skinn (Forces in Combat, Marvel Team Up, Future Tense and Valour), by 1983 Marvel UK moved mainly to monthly titles such as The Daredevils (featuring Moore and Davis's Captain Britain). Many of Marvel UK's titles wouldn't last long, however, before being combined or cancelled outright due to poor sales. In January 1985 the first issue of Captain Britain Monthly appeared with its titular strip written by Jamie Delano and drawn by Alan Davis. This title lasted 14 issues before cancellation and would prove to be Marvel UK's last major new title for several years. New material was still being produced, such as the Zoids stories (written by Grant Morrison) for Secret Wars and Spider Man and Zoids, but not on the scale or diversity previously seen. For the remainder of the 1980s the company published only a small handful of titles that appealed to superhero fans, but had considerable success on the UK newsstands with licensed titles such as Care Bears, Lady Lovely Locks, The Real Ghostbusters, ThunderCats, Transformers, and many others. These all featured original strips as well as some US reprints. Transformers, in particular, was a major seller for Marvel UK, selling 200,000 copies a week at its height. Its main writer, Simon Furman, would eventually take over the Marvel US version of the title as well, and continues to work on the franchise to this day, though it is no longer published by either branch of Marvel Comics. The Marvel UK Transformers series, running 332 issues, is, besides Bob Budiansky's run on the American comic, regarded as the most important collection of Transformers fiction. As such, Transformers remains one of Marvel UK's most important historical titles. (The Marvel UK Transformers series was reprinted by Titan Books in the 2000s with some omissions, notably all of the UK exclusive stories prior to issue 45. Although these have now been reprinted by IDW Publishing along with the rest of the weekly and Annual stories as part of The Transformers Classics UK collections.) From 1988, it was The Real Ghostbusters that became the top seller; it ran for 193 issues, four annuals, and a Slimer spinoff, and its characters were used to anchor several other titles like Wicked! and The Marvel Bumper Comic. In 1988, Marvel UK letterer/designer Richard Starkings pushed for the company to publish its own US format comics, beginning with Dragon's Claws and Death's Head (a spin off character from Marvel UK's Transformers title). The Sleeze Brothers (1989–1990) was a creator owned title by John Carnell and Andy Lanning. It was Steve White who launched the first critically acclaimed volume of Knights of Pendragon (1990–1991), written by Dan Abnett and John Tomlinson with art by Gary Erskine, which mixed superheroes and Arthurian myth. It also featured Captain Britain among many other Marvel Comics heroes, such as Iron Man. Strip was a short lived comics anthology published by Marvel UK in 1990. It ran for 20 issues (February November 1990) and featured work by many British comics creators, including Alan Grant, Ian Gibson, Pat Mills, Kevin O'Neill, Si Spencer and John Wagner. Strips include Marshal Law by Pat Mills and Kev O'Neill and Grimtoad by Grant, Wagner and Gibson. By 1990, Marvel had told its UK branch that long miniseries were too expensive and that it should produce four issue minis (John Freeman recalled "some legal or distribution restriction in the US on publishing three part miniseries, which the company would have preferred") that would try out new characters. Freeman and Dan Abnett first wanted to revive Death's Head, give a miniseries to Strip character Rourke of the Radlands, and spin off Doctor Who Magazine's Abslom Daak as an original character. This last one was dropped as Marvel felt Doctor Who was "a 'dead' franchise and there was no value to Marvel in seeking to extend a brand they did not themselves own."

Paul Neary became Marvel UK editor in chief circa 1990, appointed to revamp the company and make another attempt at the US market. As a stop gap, he had two short lived reprint titles created: Havoc and Meltdown (which reprinted Akira). The US format titles began with Death's Head II, a recreation of Simon Furman's cyborg bounty hunter. The titles were set in the existing Marvel Universe but with more of a focus on cyberpunky science fiction and magic than the traditional superhero fare. Titles such as Warheads (wormhole hopping mercenaries), Motormouth (later Motormouth and Killpower, a streetwise girl and escaped genetically modified super assassin hop around the universe having adventures) and a second volume of Knights of Pendragon. These were all linked by plots featuring the organization Mys Tech, a shadowy group of Faustians bent on world domination. Some of these titles were also reprinted in the UK anthology Overkill. At some point during Neary's run but before the market crash, Marvel UK was running low on money. They requested an emergency meeting with Marvel Entertainment executives Bill Bevin and Terry Stewart to approve a £1m last ditch strategy. While they got the money, writer Sean Howe would later be told that Bevin was livid about being called to London for a mere one million, asking "why are you wasting my time?" Neary instituted a deliberate policy to feature Marvel US guest stars in the Marvel UK stories. However, they would only be featured on eleven pages, and these pages were designed to be able to cut from the main story; the eleven pages without the guest star were run in Overkill. This policy was dropped after market research showed people expected to see superheroes in Marvel ("that included watching a group of teenagers rip Overkill apart from behind a two way mirror", according to Freeman). Where US Marvel characters were featured, all the storylines were approved by the American editor in charge of that book. Some were more responsive than others to the outlines, with editors such as Bobbie Chase offering useful feedback for Marvel UK's editors. Very few Marvel US comics referenced any of the original characters or major events that occurred within the Marvel UK comics, with an exception being The Incredible Hulk in August 1993. Nevertheless, in the US, these comics were initially immensely successful, with some issues being reprinted to keep up with demand. Marvel UK massively expanded, and trading cards were made of their characters. During this flush period, Tom DeFalco requested they make a new hero called Red Squirrel Man. An entire sub imprint called Frontier Comics was created in 1993, patterning itself after DC's Vertigo Comics and Marvel UK even showed up at the Lord Mayor's Show in 1993, with staff members dressed as superheroes and Death's Head II. Despite a lineup that included Liam Sharp, Simon Coleby, Bryan Hitch, Carlos Pacheco, Graham Marks, Salvador Larroca, Dan Abnett, and many others, too many titles were launched too quickly in a market which was already swamped by the early 1990s comics boom. In late 1993, Marvel UK would be devastated by the comics market glut and subsequent crash; on September 29, their new Director of Sales, Lou Bank, reported that they were being hurt by "inadequate display of product" at retail "[that] has hindered sale through" and that it was failed there was "simply no room to display" all the comics being made. Dark Guard, Cyberspace 3000, Wild Thing, Black Axe, Super Soldiers, Paul Neary told Comic World that this was a "trimming of fat" to allow Marvel UK to focus its marketing efforts on "our strongest characters" and claimed the canceled projects would see the light of day in 1994. as part of a marketing strategy to portray the new Marvel UK as a lean, hungry company that could hold its own against the larger (and implicitly duller) competition. In 1994, Marvel UK had ceased publishing in the US market and was now only printing a handful of titles — mostly reprints — for the UK market, as well as licensed titles like the long running Doctor Who Magazine. Death's Head II was canceled at #16, of which distributor Capital only sold 7,400 copies. Various creators began looking elsewhere for work and Lou Banks left for Dark Horse Comics. Neary planned a four title relaunch of their US format line, including Nocturne (an updated Night Raven), The Golden Grenadier, Doctor Who Magazine continued to carry the Marvel UK logo and indicia up to the December 1999 issue (#285), after which it was changed to only Panini UK.