SATURDAY 29th JULY 1989
At the time of this post we’re one day away from the year anniversary of these posts and it’s a particularly brilliant checklist this week! First though, check out John Marshall and Dave Harwood’s cover for The Real Ghostbusters which reminded me of the lacklustre second movie, and Geoff Senior’s exciting Dinobot cover to Transformers and Action Force.
Not mentioned in the editorial of the former is a multi-issue competition to win a bunch of toys. Readers had to design a new monster for the team to fight. I designed a version of their HQ building that had been taken over by Gozer but I never sent it in. Guess what someone else across the water in England completely randomly also designed and ultimately won the competition with? Damn it. On the letters page a reader has gone to the trouble of writing in to ask why Winston had a moustache in the film but not the cartoon, only for Peter to reply explaining what razors are.
In Transformers, the UK black and white story was drawn by Simon Coleby and it suited his style perfectly! The lack of colour also brought a darker tone to some of the storytelling and settings. For example, this tale was set somewhere called Slaughter City, a place full of dead, partly decapitated Decepticons strung up everywhere as a warning. Glorious stuff that was exclusive to us this side of The Pond. Wonderful! There was also news of the next week’s story and I just might read that issue again next time, as it’s one of my absolute favourites!
The Sleeze Brothers got a funny description in this week’s checklist and it really was a belter of a story, but then again every single one of their issues was a classic. With just the one, long story their comic gets a lot more detail than Transformers or The Real Ghostbusters, because those two had so much content to list off. However, a new weekly comic was about to give the monthlies a run for their money in terms of story length.
I bought the first issue of The Punisher but can’t remember if I owned any more. Having such a huge comic as a weekly was awesome. Even though the following issues would be half the size they were still thicker than the usual Marvel UK weeklies. I remember putting the badge on my schoolbag and I loved the RoboCop movie adaptation back up which was fun to read. While I don’t usually like movie adaptations I’d only seen the film once and, due to its contents, it wasn’t something I was going to get a chance to watch again at home for a while!
No new adverts this week, not even for the release of a brand new comic. Frank Castle would have to wait a month to get a bit of solo promotion. Then again, the checklists did that for them, a handful of comics at a time. These lists told us a lot more than most of the adverts anyway. See you in seven.
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