England's Dreaming

You know that feeling when you're reading a book but you don't want it to end just yet? I haven't finished the Dan Abnett Dr.Who novel yesterday for that reason. So...
Yesterday, I was looking at British comics and how they influenced my reading habits. We'd reached the early 70s and the launch of the Marvel UK weeklies. I was no longer reading the humour comics like Whizzer and Chips by this stage; pocket money was spent on headier fare.

I've blogged before on the erratic shipping of Marvel and DC Comics in the Lanarkshire area in the Sixties and Seventies. As a six year old, I'd been able to follow the FF fairly regularly for about a year ; Thor, Iron Man, the Avengers and the Hulk somewhat less so; and to come across the occasional issue of Sub-Mariner, the X-Men and Captain Marvel. I wasn't a big fan of Captain America, Spider-Man or the Silver Surfer but I certainly wouldn't turn them down.

 My DC consumption had largely revolved around the Double Double comics and, later, the monthly b/w reprint , Super DC; but the 80 page giants were really my gateway drug. I was dimly aware of the Relevancy Era but I was completely bowled over by the brutality and freewheeling invention of Kirby's Fourth World, starting here:

Despite this quantum leap in style and content, I was too young to realise that the defection of the King would hobble the House of Ideas for quite some time. But it didn't matter too greatly anyway because, with the arrival of the British weeklies, the majority of US Marvels vanished from the newagents and general stores for about three years- which is an eternity when you're about ten.

That yellow To Let or For Sale sign marks the site of Baird's pet and hardware store in Kirk Street in Strathaven, where I bought most of the DC comics in this (and many other) posts. Here's another view of the street, facing the opposite direction, towards the castle and the cemetary.

Baird's was roughly where the vehicle is parked in this photo. Marshall's bakery was on that corner and the Sun Hotel was on the other side of Kirk Street.


Those early Fourth World books swiftly began to feature Forties reprints of Sandman, Manhunter and Boy Commandos and, in turn, they opened the floodgates for the 100 page Super-Spectaculars:

 These were tremendous value for money and treasure-troves of obscure characters, including the Quality stars: the Ray, the Black Condor, et cetera. When the JLA and the Legion went to 100- page size, with new stories and text features every month, it almost made up for the ignominious end of Kirby's tetralogy. But you couldn't shake the impression that DC was a museum, displaying long-ago triumphs.

FOOM magazine, on the other hand, was giving me feverish glimpses of the thrilling, Kung Fu- taboo world of US Marvel: where the children of Satan had their own four-colour adventures; where bare-breasted women were about to be decapitated in the Hyborian Age; where Avengers became Madonnas and Martians ate babies. Look-In's adventures of The Bionic Woman didn't have, er, a look-in.

In the wake of the Three-Day week, the paper shortage and the Cod War, the stars of British Marvel stable proliferated, beginning with the astonishingly violent and cruel world of Shang-Chi, followed by the double whammy of Planet of the Apes and Dracula Lives, in October 1974. I don't know if it was the imagery or the expense but Dracula Lives was never on my weekly order; over the last five years, however, I've caught up with its diet of lycanthropy, mummification and succubi in the reprint pages of Essential Marvel Horror and Essential Tomb of Dracula.
POTA was a cash-in on the tv series, which was never aired in the STV region, to my knowledge.I had however, seen the movie Battle For the Planet of the Apes at the cinema in East Kilbride some time previously. That painted image of the burly Joy of Sex Man  restrained by apes signified that this was a transmission from the illicit, swinging world of US Marvel. In fact, a variety of quite classy sci-fi material appeared in the relatively long life of this weekly - Future History Chronicles, Day of the Triffids, Man-Gods from Beyond the Stars- and more mature superheroics- Panther's Rage, Kane's Warlock. Of course, there were less stellar entries: Colan's Captain Marvel and the bizarre and shameless bastardisation of Killraven : Apeslayer.

That's the first Conan magazine I ever bought; it was the defining influence on my writing as a schoolboy, along with The Lord of the Rings.

POTA's early Kirby Ka-Zar strips and the Gil Kane Barsoom homage Gullivar Jones were actually more to my taste than the apes so I was hell-bent on a regular order for the weekly British reprint edition of Savage Sword of Conan. I also followed its eclectic stablemate The Super Heroes, which featured the Surfer, the X-Men, Doc Savage, Giant-Man, the Cat, and as material dried up, Bloodstone and the Scarecrow.
SSOC led me to the b/w US magazine version and ultimately to sword and sorcery in paperback. But British Marvel pioneered a new style of comic with a UK media blitz by Smilin' Stan himself: the landscape format of The Titans.

This was, despite the hype, a fairly nondescript ragbag of Sixties and early Seventies material but its value for money approach was quickly adopted by the Spider-Man weekly.

Like Steve of Steve Does Comics, I never read the first part but this story haunted me for months.


The most memorable moment in the history of this format, for me, was the one-panel cameo of Freedom's Five in the Invaders reprint.

There was never a Marvel Premiere outing for this quintet, nor did I realise for nearly a decade that they were a typical Thomas homage to someone else's idea, namely these guys:

The Club of Heroes aka The Batmen of All Nations

Nevertheless, I'd like to read the exploits of the Greatest Heroes of The War to End All Wars; I'd even write them myself, although thanks to Knight and Squire, I expect Paul Cornell will one day chronicle their adventure with Wilfred Owen.

Marvel's original FF by Geoff Isherwood

Aside from landscape, there was another quintessentially 70s format heralded by British Marvel: the Treasury Edition. Again, terrific value but, because I owned so many recent b/w reprints, I didn't buy very many. Again, that's all changed in recent years.I've even bought a few of the DC editions which seemed impossibly rare and enticing, in those days. I passed up on Howard the Duck and Captain America's Bicentennial Battles at the time but here are four I did buy :

 70s Kirby Kozmic and Buscema Barbarism

But I'm getting ahead of myself. By 1975, a variety of US Marvel titles had begun to appear on the counter in Craig's newsagent in Strathaven's Common Green. at 5p and then 6p, I could afford to pick up a new one nearly every day, as a First Year at the Academy. My British weeklies were supplemented on a daily basis by Skull the Slayer, Guardians of the Galaxy, Super-Villain Team -Up and more. This pattern would continue right up until I left for Highers at Hamilton Grammar.
 

 The smallest of the three yellow pennants points to Craig's shop, partially obscured by the tall tree.  Folllow the dark green frontage of the (now closed) Victoria Wine on the left to Main Street (!); in the mid-70s, the building with the white upper storey and brown lower storey housed the Savings Bank where my dad was manager. Continue past the stop sign, up the hill towards the greenery and turn right: you're now back on Kirk Street, as above.Who could have predicted that over thirty years later, I'd end up in another small town, this time in the Highlands?

 As we've seen previously on "Place",  Marvel UK's first, original creation was Union Jack's near-contemporary, Captain Britain. But, as the economic situation worsened during the premiership of Cappy's guest-star Jim Callaghan, many Marvel weeklies were subsumed into each other, just as Fleetway comics were wont to do and as the Power Comics did, nearly ten years before.

Sadly, the quaint, Merrie Olde England adventures of the Lion of London didn't really reflect the tastes of Airstrip One's punk kids. I'd been vaguely aware of the furore surrounding Action, the brutal weekly comic that had swaggered, feathercut and reeking of Brut and fags, referencing Jaws and the Sweeney, into the playgrounds and the pages of the Daily Mail. I was around for Prog One of 2000 AD however.

 Early strips like Flesh and Harlem Heroes harked back to mid-70s Hollywood while M.a.c.h-1 was a grittier, beerier Steve Austin .I was drawn, however, to the sexy, European depiction of spiffing spaceman Dan Dare. IPC and the Mighty Tharg would have a seismic effect upon British and US comics for the next decade.
The autumn of 77 saw the launch of two more Marvel weeklies: The Complete Fantastic Four was a partial Silver Age reprint title, but also focused on that grim, early-70s era where Thomas, Conway and Buscema brought Reed and Sue  to the brink of divorce and the imperious Medusa was reduced to a bland hanger-on. Rampage was, for my money, the more interesting of the pair, reprinting the Englehart/Gerber Defenders and Marv Wolfman's nostalgic Nova, a tribute to both Ditko's Spider-Man and the Green Lantern Corps
Space Opera was about to experience a massive revival and the dystopian worlds of the British New Wave, the apes and the Omega Man would all evaporate like Alderaan before the Death Star. Star Wars Weekly debuted in early 1978; among the memorable strips it would carry were Starlin's Warlock, Claremont and Byrne's Starlord and the Micronauts.
Meanwhile, towel-bearing interstellar hitch-hikers were building a cult following on BBC radio. Improbably enough, that popularity would have a significant effect on another, more venerable BBC property and that, in turn, leads us to Fit the Third in this unexpected trilogy....

Next: Future Shock
The Legal Bit: all images are presumed copyright of their respective owners.