Anyone who follows the OiNK Blog’s socials will know I was recently admitted to hospital with a very bad infection and work on the website was temporarily paused as a result. Add to this the fact a dear friend also became very ill recently (unrelated) and it’s been a hell of a few weeks. We’re both on the mend now, although I’m going to take a few more days to fully come around as I’m still exhausted pretty much all of the time. I’m home though and resting up.
I’ll hopefully start getting caught up on the blog’s posts next week. In the meantime, thank you all for your messages and a huge thank you as well to the wonderful NHS Belfast Royal Hospital and the Celerion medical research staff who got me through this. In particular, while the infection had nothing to do with the Celerion trial I was on, I just wanted to make sure I thanked the doctors and nurses there who really went above and beyond with me, whose aftercare has been so good, and who really helped me get to the bottom of it all.
The Real Ghostbusters were taking another break this week before their last fortnightly issue but out in deep space Marvel UK’s The Transformers and Action Force had to get around a problem with their next imported US strip.
I remember receiving a Transformers video for Christmas back then with a particularly dodgy episode on it called The Big Broadcast of 2006. In the UK comic we had stories set after The Transformers: The Movie (which was set in the then-future of 2005/6) and those characters travelled back in time and interacted with the Cybertronians in present day tales skilfully interwoven with the imported strips from across the pond by writer Simon Furman.
But Marvel US had decided to adapt said dodgy cartoon episode into comic form and it completely contradicted a whole bunch of lengthy British story arcs. The solution? Lee Sullivan’s cover should tell you everything you need to know. One page was added at the beginning and end (next week) of the strip, giving the comic its own Dallas-type moment of “it was all a fairytale”, read out by TV-loving Wreck-Gar. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. The UK bits, anyway.
More importantly though, we’re Checklist-less this time (don’t worry, very soon they’ll be here every single week) but that doesn’t mean I can’t uphold my promise from the beginning of this series. So I’ve borrowed an advert from another Marvel UK comic this week to plug the gap.
Around this time Marvel editor Richard Starkings knew from launching The Real Ghostbusters that it was possible to tell a story in one page so he commissioned strip adverts for a load of their comics, meaning they could be rerun instead of new ones having to created all the time for individual issues. Mostly these were all created in the style of the comic they were advertising and I particularly liked this one written by Simon, drawn by Lee and lettered by Richard.
Speaking of ads, alongside next week’s Mighty Marvel Checklist there’ll be two more adverts, one in keeping with the style above. Then, when The Real Ghostbusters goes weekly from #14 we’ll have an unbroken run of checklists for at least a couple of months. So I hope you’re enjoying these weekly trips down memory lane to the 80s so far. If so, please let me know on socials over at Bluesky (personal), Instagram (OiNK) and Facebook (OiNK).
So much for the Vampirella cover. We were told last month there’d be one and I assumed it would be a classic reprint, what with the comic’s cancellation at #10 decided but there being a need for an extra cover this month, the second half of an American strip taking the lead position inside (and they probably didn’t want to pay out for a new cover for a cancelled comic). But instead, #9 of Dark Horse International’s Dracula has this very basic (it feels rushed) cover by Woodrow Pheonix, letterer on Crusade in Aliens.
Lying to people about “sovereignty” and “losing control” in order to gain power… that wouldn’t happen today, surely?
On the editorial page we’re told the next issue will include a “feature-length” chapter of Vlad the Impaler to finish off this real-life prequel strip. With hindsight we know this was because it would be the final issue. At least they knew ahead of time so they had the chance to properly finish off the imported Topps Comics strip. First up, this penultimate issue contains the next 16 pages of chapter two, as ever written by Roy Thomas, drawn by Esteban Maroto, coloured by Paul Mounts and lettered by John Costanza.
The mass murdering Vlad has allied himself with Christianity while his enemy Mehmed the Conqueror allies himself with none other than Radu, Vlad’s younger brother. The plan is to annex Wallachia and install Radu as the Prince. Radu promises the people sovereignty of their country but only if they back him. Lying to people about “sovereignty” and “losing control” in order to gain power… that wouldn’t happen today, surely?
After losing a series of battles, Vlad pleas with other countries to come to his aid but to no avail. However, this doesn’t stop his Religious Crusade as he slices across Europe killing thousands in the name of the Christian god, the people suffering as a result. “My poor peasants moaned at their loss,” a caption upon an image of the slaughtered poor says. “But commoners cannot appreciate the measures a besieged Prince must take on their behalf.” Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, as they say.
Instead of helping diseased peasants he uses them, sending them into other countries and military troop gatherings to infect and weaken them. His callousness and self-interest drive the story and I must say it’s compulsive reading, even if everything about him disgusts me. His tactics look like they could be working until a mis-timed attack fails and only serves to rouse Mehmed from his complacency, putting Vlad on the back foot and leading to a desperate, horrifying action.
Originally intending to take Wallachia by force, The Forest of the Impaled shocks Mehmed into retreating for the first time, leaving Radu behind to become Prince on his own. Elsewhere, we find out the woman Vlad captured and forced to be his “love” is now named ‘Transylvania’. He describes her as being, “Near at hand, yet some part of her forever unattainable, uncontrollable”. This is very different to Mina. This woman is a slave, forced into a physical relationship with the Prince. An arrow does bring a message that ends with her suicide but as you can see it’s not a message from an enemy lying about the death of her one true love.
Instead, the thought of her horrible existence becoming even worse is the reason she takes her own life. This tears Vlad apart and he leads his pitiful army to Hungary and an ally, but the Hungarian leader has no stomach for war. Instead, through a convoluted pretence he separates Vlad from his troops and imprisons him, albeit in a palace! Forged letters are sent to all of his allies and enemies telling them he’s back on the side of the Sultan. With this news and his lonely existence he slowly goes crazy.
The cliffhanger is dreadfully forced. We know where this particular retelling of history will end up and I think it would’ve been more suspenseful to just finish it with him in his crazed state. The battles are also beginning to become much of a muchness but Vlad’s overall arc and the elements that (sadly) mirror politics in our modern world are fascinating. The final chapter should be interesting.
The Bloodlines news pages are light on much of interest, however Sound Bites does quote the legendary Christopher Lee who of course played Dracula earlier in his career (although to me he’ll always be Scaramanga). Such a shame his quote shows up the fact that he either hadn’t seen the film or wasn’t paying attention, as he attributes Anthony Hopkins to the title role. Whoops.
The second and final part of Vampirella: Death’s Dark Angel is shorter than last time but packs a lot in. With no blood substitute she knows she’ll not be able to control her urges and she’ll end up feeding on Wade. But this is just what he wants, so she continues to fight against it. Adam and Conrad Van Helsing are also in the cell and she finds herself opening up to the younger of the two (Conrad was knocked unconscious by Wade). However, having been shot, Adam collapses and the blood from his wound forces some primal instinct inside Vampirella. She breaks free of her chains but as she’s about to feast on her new ally she sees his face and with all her strength pushes back against the urge.
Of course this is when Conrad awakens and for the umpteenth time he gets the wrong idea and tries to kill her, but ends up killing the corrupt cop as he enters their cell and Adam and Vampirella let him believe he’s staked her instead. I like Adam and I understand part of his likability comes from the predicament he’s found himself in between his dad and a good vampire, but Conrad is just an annoying caricature by this point. Even Von Goosewing wasn’t this inept in Count Duckula! And why can he no longer sense her like he did before?
The demon, Skaar attacks the Helsings then suddenly just disappears. This is because Wade has finally forced the starving vampire to bite him! But as Skaar explains, Vampirella isn’t from Earth; she’s an alien, and her race can’t transform people, only kill them. It turns out Skaar was originally a human, namely Wade’s father! Having spent many years as a demon serving penance for his own life, he wasn’t serving Wade. Rather, he was merely waiting for his son’s death because only a soul blacker than his own could take his place and finally release him from his demonic prison.
This was a surprise ending! It’s solemn and moving before becoming horrifying on the final page, although Wade deserves everything he gets. However, does this mean Vampirella did kill the man on the plane? I assumed before the serum she could take what she needed without killing. A question for another time. I hope we get one final outing for her in the final issue. (UPDATE: We do not.) Given how she’s dressed I’ve been surprised at how maturely written and interesting the stories have been, eradicating my initial misgivings.
This month’s author interview is with Kim Newman so that promised series of female authors is disappointingly dead in the water. I remember Newman as a film reviewer on TV back in the 90s and I never liked him. To me, he was the kind of clichéd reviewer who thought they were right and everyone else was wrong and this plays out in this interview with the comic’s Dave Hughes.
Kim’s novel, Anno Dracula is a sequel to the original book set in an alternate world where Dracula wasn’t killed by Van Helsing, instead wooing Queen Victoria and carrying out his dastardly plan to turn England into a kingdom of vampires. He wooed Victoria? What about Mina? Kim admits he mainly used other authors’ fictional characters (Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Jekyll etc.) in the book, yet at the same time criticises other Dracula sequels for copying moments from the original book! That’s a bit rich. He also calls everyone who didn’t like his book “fat anoraks”. So yep, he’s definitely the person I remember.
Much more interesting is a look at the Mega-CD game of the film. We were promised last month (and on the contents page of this issue) a review of the game but instead it’s very much a reworded press release compiled by Amiya Lopez, complete with a guide to what a Mega-CD actually was for the uninitiated. The last sentence of the main article kind of gives it away that they hadn’t actually played it.
I’ve very fond memories of that time, of reading those first years of Edge magazine and getting excited at the sudden leaps in videogame technology. While I personally invested in a Panasonic 3DO (and loved it), I have a fondness for most of the tech from that time and the constant add-ons for the Sega Mega Drive always fascinated me. They’re very much of their time and I enjoyed this little look at a game I’d never seen before, even if it was apparently terrible.
To round up, despite hindsight telling us the editorial writer knew cancellation was on the way, the letters page still asks readers to write in with suggests of how they’d like the comic to evolve over the coming months. They were in for a shock four weeks later, and not of the good kind. We’ll see how things are (hopefully) wrapped up on Sunday 14th September 2025.
The Mighty Marvel Checklist is back after a week’s rest (that first outing must’ve exhausted the poor thing) and there’s a lot more squeezed into its half-page entry inside The Real Ghostbusters (cover by Brian Williamson and Dave Elliott) from this day way back in 1988.
There was no checklist in #179 of The Transformers and Action Force but this will happen with either comic at different points over the course of the checklist’s run, and since I’ll be showing adverts from both along the way I’m just going to show both covers every week anyway. It also doesn’t hurt that Jerry Paris provided this Transforms cover, with the new and improved Optimus Prime taking on the role of quippy 80s action hero rather well.
The checklist doesn’t do the ‘busters justice this week, because not only do they meet the ghost of King Arthur of Camelot in the story briefly mentioned below, but in another strip the Containment Unit malfunctions and lots of fan-favourite ghosts and monsters from previous issues make cameo appearances and Slimer enters the unit to make the fix for Egon. Two very memorable strips for me.
Our two comics may get short-changed a bit but at least Huckleberry Hound gets his promotion promoted, the Galaxy Rangers edge closer to their final issue and in Thundercats did they really have to rescue those two? Interesting that the Doctor Who Magazine entry focuses solely on the comic strip when it’s only one part of the publication. Then again, it had a lot less pages back then so the strip was a bigger part of the whole.
Finally, Dragon and his Claws got their first inkling of the true nature of their missions for the National Union of Retired Sports Experts (N.U.R.S.E) in the dystopian future of 8162, the start of an arc that would become the main thread of the final issues the following year. I read the whole series for the first time only two years ago and it was a phenomenal comic, one that deserved to run and run but would ultimately be cut short just ten issues in.
As we go through this weekly series any issues of the comics featured on the checklist (or adverts) that have been covered on the blog (or on Instagram in the case of Transformers) will be linked to at the bottom of each post, alongside any titles that have received a more general round up in the Retrospectives section. You never know, there might be more of these Marvel UK comics to add to these links on the blog as time goes on.
Don’t forget, if you remember reading any of these issues let us know on the socials (links in the menu).
Okay, so as I said on the menu page for this series there were eight weeks in total out of a whopping 74 that The Real Ghostbusters (still fortnightly so no issue this week) and Transformers didn’t print a Mighty Marvel Checklist. However, I did promise I’d also be showing you all of the comics adverts published alongside the checklists as we go, and that they’d help us plug those annoying gaps.
First up though, what’s with that circus-based Stephen Baskerville cover? The Cosmic Carnival is a story I’ve seen derided in the usual negativity-filled corners of the fandom but when I read it for the first time a handful of years back I found it to be a silly but fun story. Taking prisoner the brilliant Sky Lynx and the human children he’s protecting, a space station-based circus puts them to work in small display cages and in the ring for daring feats. It’s actually a clever script that highlighted the problem with zoos of the day, as well as introducing a wider universe of alien species to the comic.
It’s also important to remember we’re talking about a comic starring sentient robots from outer space that can transform into various forms of human transport so sometimes it’s best not to take things too seriously. So, on to that advert and it’s one that brings back memories. Back in 1988 I read the comic advertised this week, the very first edition of The Marvel Bumper Comic. Fleetway had been enjoying great success with their Big Comic Books and had just released their new fortnightly comic version in mid-June. Repackaging reprints had the potential of great returns with little outgoings.
The Marvel Bumper Comic would soon become a fortnightly (then weekly) comic itself but this was the only one I bought as a kid. I remember enjoying it but wishing the strips weren’t so short. Obviously quantity was key here to reinforce the “Bumper” part of the title. Plus it didn’t hurt trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. It’s a curious glimpse at the Marvel UK of the day in one purchase if you can find it on eBay. Perhaps one to join the blog at a later date? Perhaps.
Did you buy the Holiday Special edition of the Bumper Comic? Have you any particularly fond memories of it or any of its contents? What did you think of publishers repackaging old strips to coax more pocket money out of our… erm, pockets? Let us know on the socials at Bluesky, Instagram or Facebook, why don’t you? More comics to check off the list next week.
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