SATURDAY 10th DECEMBER 1988
Bambos Georgiou brought us his first full cover for this week’s The Real Ghostbusters. He’d taken over from Lew Stringer on the Blimey! It’s Slimer strip but I’d forgotten all about his other contributions to the comic. Across the way Art Wetherell and Stephen Baskerville brought us the latest Transformers and Action Force cover with the trademark Marvel UK stippled background they used so much across their range at the time.
Inside, Bambos’ humour strip had grown to a full page as the green glob’s popularity continued to soar. Through this comic, Marvel Bumper Comic, It’s Wicked and his own monthly he soon became something of a mascot for the publisher, despite not being their property. This is one of those unique issues when the strips and prose story form part of a larger tale. Despite the somewhat simplistic cover, it’s also one of the better issues from the early days of the run.
There’s more travelling back to an adventure from a millennia ago to add previously unknown backstory to Optimus Prime and Megatron in their main strip this week, and ol’ Megs finally gets his own A-Z page to mark the occasion. Elsewhere, a Transformers torch is advertised. It doesn’t actually transform, unless you count it alternating between being lit up and not being lit up as a transformation! What else was on the menu this week?
Apart from what we’ve already covered above and in last week’s checklist the only other entry is the latest issue of the now-fortnightly Thundercats. The previously epic-sounding storylines we’d read about in the checklists seem to have been permanently replaced by ones with somewhat lesser stakes for the characters.
Last week the Marvel Bumper Comic advert hinted at content relating to two recent cinema releases, namely Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Willow. Fans of the latter had more to celebrate this week with the news of a full comics adaptation of the new movie starring Val Kilmer, Joanne Whalley, Warwick Davis and the brilliant Jean Marsh.
Believe it or not I’ve never seen the film! It’s one of those childhood fantasy movies I always felt I’d missed out on and in recent years I’ve been correcting that (I saw Labyrinth fully for the first time just two years ago) and having seen enough clips of Willow when I was a child, and with such a stellar cast, it’s about time I added it to my Christmastime movie marathons. No, it’s not a festive film but it’s the perfect time of year for such childhood movies, isn’t it?
There’s no checklist next week but don’t fret, it’ll be back just in time for us to reminisce about those special Christmas issues we always looked forward to so much. But first, next week there’ll be another fun one-page strip advert, this time for one of the main comics from this checklist series and it’s a good one. So be here for that in seven days. That’s just enough time for you to get through your third packet of mince pies.
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