Saturdays and Secret Sensations

Hallooo, Space Chums! (especially my own Blake's Seven. I put in a little Calvin and Hobbs reference for you yesterday. Thanks very much for coming by!)
My original idea with this week's posts was to trace my own development as a reader through comics- it was Marvel's Conan the Barbarian that led me to Tolkien and Robert E. Howard for example, while DC's Weird Worlds introduced me to Edgar Rice Burroughs. And I was led to the Big Two, in turn, by British comics. However, I also want to explore how  those British comics contributed to their sexier American counterparts...and revisit some of the "fantastic places" where I once bought them.

Two posts ago, we started in the Swinging Sixties, with TV21 and Odham's Power Comics. I neglected to mention the brief tenure of Tales of Asgard in The Eagle and the ignominious end of TV21 in 1970, which (equally briefly) hosted Spidey, the Silver Surfer, the Ringo Kid and  the Western Ghost Rider.

No Future For You. One day, I'd like to write Johnny's team-up with Captain Britain

The Seventies was a golden era for Neil Tennant's Marvel UK but the arrival of 2000 AD in 1978 represented a new force in British comics. Star Lord was a glossy stablemate in the following year, if a short-lived one. However, it introduced Ro-Busters and Strontium Dog, the mutant bounty hunter ( a blend of Mad Max and the Man With No Name and a character popular enough to star in Big Finish audio plays)

Not that one, this one.

As I mentioned above, Marvel's Conan had led me to the Sphere paperbacks and then on to the British monthly version of Savage Sword of Conan. Early issues were pretty elusive however and I haunted Central Station's concourse for a couple of weeks in the summer of 78, trying to get this lurid little number.

 The Road of Excess

I became a much more avid reader of SSOC UK later in its run. And yet again, I'm getting ahead of myself.

 In the late 70s, superheroes were big tv stars- The Hulk, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man. It was the popularity of  Ol' Greenskin that probably led to the rebranding of Rampage as a monthly magazine, reprinting b/w period adventures of Kirby's thuggish man-monster. The second issue carried a text feature on the X-Men and I glommed onto it because it provided a titbit about the mysterious deceased X-man Thunderbird, whom I'd never seen. The reprint of G-S X-Men 1 the following year consequently represented a huge comics event for me; I think every panel is memorised.

 

Super-heroes were a tv sensation but sci-fi, thanks to George Lucas, was also massive: Logan's Run, Battlestar Galactica, Blake's Seven and of course Doctor Who. Tom Baker had been the Doctor forever but the ITV strike of 1979 ensured huge viewing figures for Season Seventeen. At home, it was generally considered, even by me, that I was getting a bit too old for comics (ha!) but there was no way I'd miss out on this:

Doctor Who, of course, had been a fixture in British weeklies since the 60s; most regularly in Polystyle's TV Comic and the perennial Holiday Specials (a phrase that still thrills me, here in Century 21)

May or June 1973!

I can visualise buying this in a kiosk, all diesel fumes and shadow, in the old Killermont Street bus garage in Glasgow, immortalised by Aztec Camera. Buchanan Street had only been pedestrianised the year before and we'd probably been shopping there or at Goldbergs in Candleriggs.

Sentimentally Yours... The Blue Bus is calling us. Driver where you taking us?

That holiday special was tremendously important to me: a two-page spread "The Enemies of Dr. Who" displayed photos of the Macra, the Fish People and the Monoids, suggesting a whole history of the series that I had never suspected. The Radio Times Tenth Anniversary Special that autumn would fill in those gaps of course and became a sort of sacred text to me.

Doctor Who Weekly served a similar function. Through its photo- and- text features I discovered the real appearance of Drahvins, Chumblies, Katarina, Sara Kingdom and the War Machines. The new strips by Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons, meanwhile, tapped into the anarchic humour of post-punk culture and the Oxbridge absurdism of Douglas Adams. It wasn't like the tv show, however, or what I and other older teen fans thought it should be ( that is, like our idea of Season Six) so I desultorily flicked through those pages - what a maroon! Of course, in short order, the comic became Doctor Who Monthly and later Doctor Who Magazine and I still buy it here:

St. Giles Centre, Elgin, Moray

When Star Lord folded into 2000AD, IPC launched Tornado, a more traditional mix of war, horror and sci-fi strips but it only survived for six months.

DWM artist Dave Gibbons IS the Big E!

In a world of strikes and hyper-inflation, sales of Marvel's weeklies were also in freefall in 1979. Dez Skinn was called in to rectify the situation which he did by commissioning new material and relaunching a Marvel comic more in line with DC Thomson's boys comics ( just as the dying TV21 did). Although I didn't care for this new direction at all at the time, I recognise that the Tolkienesque Black Knight serial and the pulpish Night Raven, despite their lack of US glamour, fed back into the American comics. Marvel Comic became the monthly Marvel Super Heroes in the autumn of 1979 and rather confusingly another Hulk title appeared in 1980. Skinn also published Starburst Magazine, from which I learned a lot about  Bakshi's Tolkein animation, The Avengers and The Prisoner.

  My first issue of Starburst, Ardrossan to Arran, August 1979

Marvel UK launched a Pocket Books series in  March 1980. I  very occasionally picked up Chiller (reprints of Tomb of Dracula and Man-Thing) and Star Heroes (Ditko's Micronauts). By now, I was taking Highers at Hamilton Grammar school and very unhappy, so I truanted a lot in Hamilton town centre before going to East Kilbride or simply home.In May, Forces in Combat debuted, another attempt to replicate trad boys comics with Marvel material; this time including Rom and Machine Man. Also that spring, the Hulk comic merged with Spider-Man, which was one of the longest-surviving weeklies and my longest-running subscription at our village shop.

 Two more weeklies were launched in November 1980 reprinting Seventies material: Valour and Future Tense. Despite being rather cannily themed titles ( fantasy and sci-fi) I think they were just a little ahead of their time. In a couple of years, Dungeons and Dragons and The Empire Strikes Back might have won them a more secure fan base. I particularly liked the Wally Wood fantasy strips in Valour but as with Forces, I only read a handful of these two. Ditto Savage Action, which focused on Marvel mercenaries and gunplay.

Several more short-lived weeklies were launched in early 1981. Alan Davis's early work appeared on the cover of Marvel Action. Captain America was awarded a weekly comic and Marvel Super Adventure featured Daredevil and Kirby's Black Panther. Meanwhile, Blockbuster was a monthly reprinting Claremont and Byrne's Iron Fist. The only new release I read regularly was the monthly Blake's Seven magazine ( the series was at the height of its popularity) but I can barely remember anything about it. That month, I started a degree course at Strathclyde University. Beyond the fact that I'd won the English prize, I had no clear motivation for study; I just knew the world of work frightened me and since most of my school friends were going into Higher Education, I followed suit.

October 81: timing is everything. In December, Everybody Dies!

Thirty years ago (!)  in September 1981, a revamped Captain Britain had returned in Marvel Super Heroes, visually updated by Alan Davis with a pseudo- guardsman's uniform that smacked to me of Alpha Flight's Vindicator. The series also tied into the Black Knight strip from Marvel Comic.

 In  January 1983, The Daredevils was launched. It was this series that really propelled Alan Moore and Alan Davis into Dick Giordano's New DC.  Moore and Davis put analogues of Sixties childhood comic heroes like General Jumbo and Dolmann through Claremontian physical and emotional ordeals in a dystopian fascist Britain. Grant Morrison would rip off the entire scenario, a mere four years later, for his hip and fashionable Zenith. Perhaps that was a metatextual comment on pop cover versions.
In 1983, I was at the end of Second Year at Strathclyde. My world looked like Gregory's Girl. I was still living at home and commuting to Glasgow but I had a modern new haircut and was beginning to learn a little bit about drinking and kissing.

I suppose I drifted away from the weeklies, not because I grew out of them by any means, but because I didn't need them. During the early 80s, I had started buying US comics by mail order and then I discovered comic shops -firstly The Science Fiction Bookshop in Edinburgh. In the mid-80s, I attended a signing session of Classic X-Men with Chris Claremont and Arthur Adams; the shop subsequently appeared in the pages of Uncanny X-Men. For more practical reasons, I began shopping in Photon Books in Glasgow's West End, which later became Futureshock. It was still trading on Woodlands Road, when I was last in Glasgow in August.

 Dark Carnival aka the Science Fiction Boohshop, West Cross Causeway and the former Photon Books, Woodlands

Well, this has taken all morning! In the fourth part of this increasingly inaccurately named trilogy  I'll focus on the surprising revival of UK Marvel in the 1990s.

Next: Yesterday When I Was Mad
The Legal Bit: all images are presumed copyright of their respective owners.