SATURDAY 23rd SEPTEMBER 1989
John Marshall got a break thanks to Brian Williamson but Dave Harwood was still slogging away on the latest cover for The Real Ghostbusters this week in 1989, while Geoff Senior supplied us with superb Pretender Beasts action for Transformers and Action Force.
The cover for The Real Ghostbusters was another promoting the free gift rather than any story, just like last week’s and a recent one for Transformers back in week 57. It was the same type of gift as the latter, too. According to the checklist there are two reprints in the comic, but in reality (again) there was only one, taken from the annual we all received just the previous Christmas. They really hadn’t been the best at marketing this comic over the past few weeks, had they? Also, only 68 issues and one-and-a-half-years in and it was already relying on reprints? It was Marvel UK’s top-selling comic by this stage so this was a real disappointment, albeit a temporary situation.
In the UK Transformers strip we were reintroduced to Decepticon Pretender Beast, Carnivac. A friend of mine owned the toy at the time and I thought it was awesome, so it was a shame he’d cancelled his comic order not long before this. Joining the Autobot Wreckers and forming The Survivors (of both the Time Wars and Underbase sagas), he wasn’t necessarily evil but his programming was still Decepticon in nature. This made for a really interesting character over the following months; one of my very favourite arcs from the whole run actually. Simon Coleby’s art was superb too, with real weight behind the action scenes. Any fan should check it out at the link below.
The Real Ghostbusters finally told readers what the prizes were in that multi-issue competition, namely book and cassette packs, “ghostly” make-up sets, watches, Ghostballs and Rough Riders tricycles. A rather random mashup if ever there was one. More Christians-as-baddies storylines in this week’s The Punisher makes it seem rather contemporary in our modern 2026 world, never mind the 80s, and below that is a surprise entry for the Thundercats.
I say it’s a surprise because we haven’t seen them in a while. In fact, their celebratory (I’m assuming) 100th issue never featured on the checklists at all, which was rather strange. It’s also a surprise because many people I’ve spoken to on the blog’s socials were sure it was cancelled before it hit the big one-oh-oh. In actual fact, it would continue in its monthly guise for a while longer and revert to fortnightly with #105, eventually lasting until #129. Given how a formerly weekly comic becoming monthly usually signalled its death knell, kudos to the cats for continuing to fight the good fight for so long.
Two ads this week, the first for a Slimer spin-off which I didn’t buy as a child. We never got the Slimer TV show here in the UK (shown as part of a Real Ghostbusters hour-long slot in the States with the main show) and so the strips in this were weird to me as a kid. It had a childish art style, he had a bunch of human friends and a whole life away from the ‘busters, and in general Slimer was very different to the one I was enjoying in the weekly comic. This monthly of American import strips would last 13 issues before merging with the main comic, where I’d ignore the strips.
Our other advert shows all of the publisher’s range of Christmas annuals for 1989. Unbelievably, despite doing such a brilliant job of showcasing many of their books with individual promos in 1988, this was the one and only advert they produced for ’89. I don’t know why they didn’t bother doing the same thing (or a variation thereof) from the year before. The Transformers and Real Ghostbusters annuals were superb and deserved more publicity, and I would’ve loved to have found out more about Action Force and Dino-Riders, but unfortunately all we got were these teeny tiny cover images, so I never asked Santa for any more than my regulars.
More cover gifts and brutal action for our two main comics next week and a certain sci-fi franchise gets the magazine treatment. See you then.
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