SATURDAY 8th JULY 1989
I can’t believe we’ve been reliving these checklists for 50 weeks already! What are we marking the occasion with? A Real Ghostbusters cover by Anthony Williams and Nick Abadzis, and for Transformers and Action Force it’s Jeff Anderson again.
It’s a week of two halves as far as our top two comics go. We’ll start off with the bad. The very bad. The strip called A Wok on the Wild Side in The Real Ghostbusters made me cringe even back then. It’s just an excuse to cram in as many Chinese and Buddhist clichés as possible as supposed jokes, and to add insult to injury the normally fantastic Dan Abnett continued these with awful spoof ghost names in Spengler’s Spirit Guide. As a child I thought they were inappropriate, as an adult they’re downright offensive and it leaves a huge red mark against one of my favourite childhood comic series.
Much better this week is the fact Bludgeon makes his debut in the UK Transformers strip. That’s him on the ground in front of Megatron on the cover. He was a Decepticon Pretender and an excellent character for the last couple of years of the comic’s life. He’d eventually rise through the ranks to become leader and even came back for Generation 2. It also doesn’t hurt that Lee Sullivan’s artwork inside is incredible, upping his line work game (not that we thought that was possible) for his black and white strip. An exciting time for a Transformers fan, that was for sure!
Even a new issue of Death’s Head can’t topple The Sleeze Brothers from their perch on the checklist for the third week in a row, a record so far in this series. Then again, by this stage Marvel UK would’ve known Death’s Head’s time was short and they had a brand new property to promote. This penultimate issue of Head’s series was the first one I wasn’t overly excited about beforehand as I’d never read any Fantastic Four comics. They’d just never appealed to me and so all the hype was lost on this reader. But as it turned out it was a brilliant introduction to the characters and their interactions with our sort-of-hero were hilarious. Check out the review with issue highlights at the link below.
Two adverts this week and it’s quite telling that Cartoon Time lists its stories in third place after competitions and puzzles. Even when I was younger and reading Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends (also from Marvel UK) the main draw was always the stories. Maybe I’m an outlier but hyped competitions have never enticed me to buy a comic or magazine. So it didn’t bode well for Cartoon Time for me as a young teen. Yes, I was older than the target audience but still, Thomas did it right!
It’s Wicked! was currently on #7 of its short run and Slimer’s presence still didn’t appeal enough for me to try it out. Perhaps that’s because he worked best as part of a team, as a mascot or sidekick. His small humour strips in The Real Ghostbusters were always fun and in the cartoon the Slimer-focused episodes were used as a great way to give us more insight into the world the ghosts inhabited. But he was proof you could have too much of a good thing. I never liked his own cartoon or comic; the joke ran thin very quickly and tainted an otherwise great character.
Yes, I know he was just one strip in It’s Wicked!, but the way he was used for promotions felt like overkill after his own comic and it merging into The Real Ghostbusters, and his appearances in The Marvel Bumper Comic. I can’t have been alone either because the comic only lasted 17 weeks before cancellation despite the cover star.
Over the summer months The Sleeze Brothers wouldn’t be the only new releases from Marvel UK in 1989. Watch out for adverts for a new mature weekly and a sci-fi magazine, plus the next strip advert and more. See you in seven.
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