Marvel UK

Concurrently with Savage Sword of Conan, Marvel UK launched a new weekly title called The Super-Heroes. Although it originally starred popular characters like the Silver Surfer and the X-Men, The Super-Heroes eventually began reprinting stories starring such obscure characters as Doc Savage, Ant-Man, The Cat, Scarecrow, and Bloodstone. Maureen Softly (using her son's name Matt in the credits). replaced Skingley as editor in late 1975.

Marvel UK's fifth superhero title, also debuting in 1975 (October), was The Titans, which was notable for its use of a "landscape" orientation. Although this format allowed two pages of Marvel U.S. artwork to fit onto one (magazine-sized) Marvel UK page, reader reaction was mixed, as it made the text small and often difficult to read. The Titans featured well-known characters like Captain America, Captain Marvel, the Sub-Mariner, the Inhumans, and Nick Fury. With issue 27 the Fantastic Four were moved over from The Mighty World of Marvel to headline the title.

The Super-Heroes lasted fifty issues before being canceled in early 1976, at which point it was merged into Spider-Man Comics Weekly, which changed its title to Super Spider-Man with the Super-Heroes. At this point, the book also changed orientation to become a landscape-format comic like The Titans. Just six issues before the end of The Titans' run, with issue 58 in November 1976, the Avengers had moved over from The Mighty World of Marvel to be its lead strip so that the Fantastic Four could join the line up of a new comic called Captain Britain. As with The Super-Heroes, on The Titans' cancellation it was merged with Spider-Man weekly, becoming Super Spider-Man and the Titans.

Tennant and Laing era

Marvel UK began to establish itself as a major publisher of weekly comic titles (along with D.C Thomson and IPC) under the direction of editor-in-chief Neil Tennant (later one of the Pet Shop Boys). Tennant was responsible for anglicising the dialogue of the comics to suit British readers, and for indicating where women needed to be redrawn "more decently" for the British editions.

However, with the exception of some new covers drawn by Marvel Comics' American staff, no original material had yet been produced by Marvel UK. This changed in 1976 when Captain Britain Weekly was launched, featuring a hero created for the British market. Captain Britain Weekly featured new stories in colour as well as reprints of Nick Fury and Fantastic Four strips as backup. It was initially a success but eventually combined with Marvel UK's Spider-Man reprint title from #39.

It was Neil Tennant's suggestion to create an original British Marvel war comic to compete with titles such as Warlord and Battle Picture Weekly. While no original material was commissioned the concept of a war comic found fruition as Fury which ran from March to August 1977 before merging with MWOM. It reprinted Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos and Captain Savage and his Leatherneck Raiders.

Tennant 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.

Skinn era ("The Marvel Revolution")

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". Taking over in late 1978, the first major change he brought was to have original material produced by British creators. 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).

The Hulk was a popular character – Rampage Weekly which starred The Defenders had been added to Marvel's list of publications under Tennant's editorship as a second vehicle for the green giant – and now with his own TV series Skinn saw the Hulk as the lead feature of another adventure style comic. Hulk Comic started out with originally produced Hulk stories by Steve Dillon, Paul Neary, and John Stokes, among others, which reflected the green-skinned behemoth as depicted on the TV. Skinn explained: "As with Marvel Comic, I was wanting an adventure anthology title more than a superhero one. Super-heroes had never been big sellers in the UK, we had plenty of legends of the past to spin fantasies about. So I went that route, picking existing Marvel characters who weren't really cut from the super-hero cloth." 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.

Skinn left Marvel UK in 1980 (eventually forming Quality Communications in 1982).

Pocket Books

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.

1980s

In September 1981, Captain Britain got his own strip in the pages of Marvel Superheroes (the by-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.