SATURDAY 21st OCTOBER 1989
I’ve got a bumper selection of nostalgia for you this week, with no less than five comics on the checklist and three contemporary comics adverts. Well, two are versions of each other but they still count. We kick things off as per usual with the covers of the two comics they’re all being pulled from.
Once again Brian Williamson, Dave Harwood and Robin Bouttell team up for The Real Ghostbusters and I’ve noticed in the way I’ve taken this photo that the sheen on the top-left clearly shows the higher paper grade both comics were enjoying around this time. For their outer 16 pages anyway. The funniest moment inside came from a tenuous link between a ghost pilot and dimensional planes in Spengler’s Spirit Guide, a page that was always guaranteed to raise a giggle.
Geoff Senior’s cover for Transformers and Action Force hinted at the return from the depths of the terrifying Thunderwing, but not before the American story continued to build towards the return of four classic characters in their new Pretender forms, namely Jazz, Bumblebee, Grimlock and Starscream. It was such an exciting time for me as a reader, the US and UK strips so simpatico with one another in each issue; side-by-side rather than the comic alternating between the two. Having four fan favourite characters I’d missed out on from earlier issues was the icing on the cake.
I mentioned before how the new look checklist would allow more comics to be covered upon occasion and this week is one such occasion. Ignore the listing of two strips as reprints for The Real Ghostbusters (possibly putting potential readers off), as discussed last time this was a mistake again. That Action Force story briefly mentioned in the entry for Transformers was superb, with the team disavowed while behind enemy lines. I’ve got great memories of that one with its superb original villains.
The cover to The Sleeze Brothers’ penultimate issue saw the duo’s idiotic faces coming out of an overflowing toilet, setting the scene perfectly for a misadventure in the sewers. Check it out in more depth in the full review at the link further below. The 13th edition of The Punisher began another new story that could easily have been set today, while the Thundercats got such a perfunctory description you have to wonder why the writer of the checklist even bothered.
On to our adverts. In this week’s Transformers the Deception Flamefeather came off the worse for wear thanks to his wannabe leader Thunderwing, but he got the star power treatment on the advert for the latest special.
Jeff Anderson’s pencils and Stephen Baskerville’s inks for the hugely enjoyable Enemy Action story were the stars of Collected Comics 14, one of the best reprint specials of the run which saw the Seacons, Firecons and Sparkler Minibots (the latter two groups based on pull-back-and-release toys that produced little sparks that were so much fun for us kids) up against none other than the always-entertaining Galvatron. Along with a superb annual story and some new A-Z fact-files it was a great special to see in the darker days with.
The other adverts were full-page and half-page variations for the new Incredible Hulk Presents, a weekly which saw the green one’s strip backed up with a variety of other tales from Action Force, Doctor Who and Indiana Jones. As a kid, the title star never appealed and his strips were the least interesting of those advertised, so I never tried the comic out. It didn’t last very long, just 12 issues and it ended one week before the checklists did, just two-and-a-half months after the premiere issue.
It had actually been launched the week before this but for some reason hadn’t made the cut for the checklists, despite there being plenty of room for it last time. I always thought it was a strange mix, what with Action Force and Doctor Who already having strips elsewhere. Although, apparently the Doctor’s stories here were brand new and would be reprinted in Doctor Who Magazine later. With four strips for what seemed like disparate audiences no wonder it didn’t last, becoming just another of a myriad of new comics launched by Marvel UK in 1988 and 1989 that disappeared quickly.
Next week, for the first time in 36 weeks there’ll be no checklist. Instead, one of our main comics gets an advert for those who were somehow unaware of it, or who maybe just needed a poke to buy one of the best comics around at the time. It’ll be here in seven days. Will you?
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I remember this week well as it was half-term and I got two extra comics, the Transformers Collected Comics and The Incredible Hulk Presents which was up to issue #4 that week – perhaps this is another reason why the series flopped if the advertising drive was staggered. I agree about the odd mix.
The Doctor Who story was one of the darker ones in TIHP, perhaps because it was written DWM editor John Freeman, possibly with an eye to it being reprinted there. The plan was to assume the readership wouldn’t overlap and reprint the TIHP strips in DWM. Freeman was (reportedly) opposed to this as he wanted to develop the DWM strip in its own direction and felt it would be undermined by mixing with reprinting material he had no editorial control over. In the end only the two-parter from TIHP #2-3 was reprinted in DWM and what would have been the strip in TIHP #13 was rescued from inventory and appeared in DWM #162.
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Copying and pasting from the TARDIS wiki page? Cheeky lol. I asked John if he could confirm any of this or not and he sent me a link when he read your comment. I’m going to add what he’s said about the comic’s Doctor Who strips in a future checklist post.
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From memoryJust checked to confirm and it was me who started the entry on the Tardis wiki in the first place some eighteen years ago so it’s unsurprising if I wrote the same again. I would have been working off my memory of the articles in Doctor Who Classic Comics in the early 1990sLikeLike
Oh come on Tim, it’s basically word-for-word with edits 😂 Even the order of things and the pacing and punctuation lol.
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Shock as person writes the same brief content in the same style as themself.
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I would never be able to rewrite a blog post from last week in as close a match from memory lol. I don’t know why you’re commenting so much all over the blog with huge comments that more often than not aim to pick holes in my work, despite the lengthy research and fact-checking I do. I will defend my blog to the hilt. Maybe you could start up your own blog instead of hijacking others’ work?
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