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THE MiGHTY MARVEL CHECKLiST: WEEK 62

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SATURDAY 30th SEPTEMBER 1989

Today 37 years ago Brian Williamson and Dave Harwood teamed up again for The Real Ghostbusters and another cover promoting a gift with a somewhat generic image. Although, I did like the way the logo sticker was incorporated. Meanwhile, Andrew Wildman returns to Transformers and Action Force with a thrilling cover for a thrilling strip.

It wouldn’t be long until The Real Ghostbusters began importing American strips as their back up. The first would be the Ghostbusters II adaptation and in the meantime the comic seemed to be treading water, already relying on reprints just a year-and-a-half into its run. As a kid I hung on in there but I’ll admit I was close to cancelling my order at this stage if the reprints didn’t disappear. This week it was another from the first annual. Did they think less readers would catch on if it came from the book? Even the new story wasn’t groundbreaking, with ghostly doubles of the team being something the comic had already done more than once (as had the cartoon).

Decepticon Pretender Beast Carnivac continued to be an intriguing character. He was a Decepticon trying his best to do the right thing but his programming was so ingrained that he’d often do the right thing through some very dark means. Here he learned about guilt the hard way after deserting some human soldiers to save his own (metallic) hide. Lee Sullivan’s strip art really was second-to-none here. At the link below check out the final panel of the story in which Octopunch has Carnivac captured. This was top tier Transformers!

Elsewhere on this week’s checklist, “brain-washed refugees” actually referred to the Christian followers of an evangelical-type leader as they landed on foreign shores in The Punisher. I doubt many such-minded people today would see the irony. The fourth issue of The Sleeze Brothers’ six-issue run was one of my favourites. I missed out on it decades ago and only put that right in 2024 so the checklist didn’t really do its hype man job for me. That was my own fault, although the description here does sound a bit too run-of-the-mill for that comic. Read its entry above and then pop over to its full review at the link below to see just how different it really was!

One advert this week and it’s for another magazine rather than Marvel UK’s bread and butter. I’ll admit I’ve never been a huge Star Trek fan. I did enjoy a few of the movies as a teenager when they were on the telly but once they were over I kind of just moved on. A friend of mine has recently been trying to get me to watch Picard, despite the fact I never watched The Next Generation (although it always looked the most appealing of all the series). At the moment I’m on an umpteenth rewatch of Babylon 5 so Jean-Luc will have to wait for now.

We’re back to a little advert wasteland next week but the new look checklist will be in colour. Um, will that be enough to entice you back? I’ll guess I’ll find out in seven.

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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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SATURDAY 16th SEPTEMBER 1989

Would John Marshall and Dave Harwood ever get time away from The Real Ghostbusters covers? Not that this week’s would’ve been particularly taxing with a huge gap designed to contain the free gift. Meanwhile, Lee Sullivan’s work for Transformers and Action Force told us more dark Deathbringer delights awaited us inside. 

Those Slime Slurps were bits of moulded plastic filled with a rubbery jelly sweet which I’d refill with a soft drink of my choice and freeze for future enjoyment. (Hey, it was nicer than the sweet!) There was an Egyptian mummy story this week but the title and creative team still didn’t match those erroneously written about in last week’s checklist. There was also the start of one of those multi-issue competitions both of these comics were keen on, although strangely with no indication of what the prize was.

Transformers felt different this week. Literally. The outer colour pages were of a really good paper grade and it felt terrific! Unfortunately this would only semi-regularly once in a while instead of every week. Artist Staz Johnson also debuted this issue with the second part of Deathbringer, following on from Geoff Senior last week. (No pressure for a newbie there!) Needless to say Staz did a great job and would become one of my favourite artists for the rest of the comic’s life. In fact, an Optimus Prime panel of his from this issue’s story had already been used six weeks ago in advert for the comic. Way to go to make an entrance, Staz.

A shame his incredible debut isn’t mentioned on the checklist, which gets the details of the UK strip completely wrong. There have been quite a few such errors recently on these lists, I must say. If this week’s issue of The Punisher was released in modern day Britain I’m sure we’d hear all about it from certain tabloids and politicians calling for it to be banned, don’t you think? Which would probably just increase sales with the rest of us.

This new look to the checklist led to them including more titles in the same space but for now it stuck to the usual four. The entry for Doctor Who Magazine squeezed an awful lot of information into a tiny space and the good ol’ Doc was also the star of this week’s new advert. DWM was celebrating its tenth anniversary with what appeared to have been a special issue, although there’s no indication of the celebratory nature of it on the checklist, strangely enough.

Why was Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor used? The series was by now starring its Seventh Doctor as played so wonderfully by Sylvester McCoy (that’s his series’ funky logo). Well, Tom’s Doctor was the star of the show and the magazine’s comic strips and news articles when it began back in 1979, that’s why (and this was the same image used for #1). In this series of blog posts we’ve already seen an advert for the special edition focussing on the show’s 25th anniversary and a checklist entry for the magazine’s 150th issue. The show celebrated its 60th a few years ago now, the magazine is only three years away from its own 50th and the current issue on sale at the time of writing is #634. Talk about feeling as old as a Time Lord!

I think I need a lie down after that realisation. Next week’s adverts include the launch of a spin-off from one of the above comics, as well as the one and only advert for all of Marvel UK’s annuals for Christmas 1989. I’ll definitely see you in seven, then.

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SATURDAY 26th AUGUST 1989

John Marshall and Dave Harwood (surprise, surprise) unwrapped another cover for The Real Ghostbusters, while this week’s Transformers and Action Force Jeff Anderson cover was one of those rare occasions when it didn’t relate to anything inside.

Instead, the focus was on the free gift, one of those temporary children’s tattoos where you’d place it on your arm, dampen it and then it should (operative word being “should”) peel off leaving the image on your skin. It was a neat idea but I can’t remember it working as well as the drawing! Storywise, the excitement at the inclusion of new toys of mine was dampened by some awful American colouring that rendered them unrecognisable. Ironically, the toys come across much better in the black and white UK strip which gave the Micromasters a proper backstory. They were created because of energy shortages. A neat idea.

The big news in the companion comic was the return of Zuul from the original Ghostbusters movie. Although, the creative team fudged their research and misnamed her Gozer. The story was a funny one though. Janine experienced everything from the famous Sigourney Weaver fridge scene, only for her to throw a wooden spoon which the hell hounds chased back inside the appliance while she gave Zuul/Gozer a kick up the bum and slammed the door on her. The grumpy online fanboys out there would probably say it belittled the film but it’s a funny comic and it’s a funny little strip so it’s a winner in my eyes.

Death’s Head was hanging on in there on the checklist, refusing to go quietly into the night with his final issue. With hindsight I have to say The Punisher could be a strange comic, what with its ‘For Mature Readers’ label on the cover while giving away badges and stickers. He nabbed another ‘Don’t Miss…’ after the yellow box disappeared for the previous couple of weeks. Any chance of our top-selling weeklies getting in on some of that action one of these days? Don’t bet on it, the box’s days were numbered.

There were no less than three new adverts for Marvel UK’s range this week. The Punisher’s previous half-page ad was basically expanded to full size with no further information. The Real Ghostbusters ad was also light on actual info, but then again did we really need anything other than to know it was available? The fans would’ve been all over it regardless. “What’s a TV Special?”, I don’t hear you cry. From what little I can recall they were back on TV screens, split into two parts every Saturday morning on ITV’s children’s magazine shows, so it was most likely to tie in with that instead of the usual changing of the seasons. Not that they needed an excuse.

Finally, the big news was the launch of Fantasy Zone, a magazine covering new fantasy and sci-fi movies, and the occasional TV show. It never took off and didn’t last long, although it did produce a couple of specials dedicated to new films such as Ghostbusters II. It was launched the same month as Visual Imagination’s similarly-titled TV Zone, “The Magazine for Cult Television”. I was a regular reader of TV Zone for several years with an order at my newsagent and it proved somewhat more successful, racking up 231 issues compared to Fantasy Zone’s measly little six.

Oh, I’ve come over all nostalgic for TV Zone now! I remember the main reason I bought it was for Babylon 5, although I was soon swept up in its Stargate SG-1 coverage (that’s how I discovered the show) and loved its occasional retrospectives of two favourites of mine, Knight Rider and War of the Worlds. Must. Stay. Away. From. EBay!

Right, I’m off to NOT look at a famous auction site and I’ll see you all back here in seven days for more checklist goodness.

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SATURDAY 19th AUGUST 1989

Frankenstein’s Monster makes an appearance on John Marshall’s and Dave Harwood’s cover for The Real Ghostbusters, surely two months early for such a classic horror staple? Meanwhile, there’s something missing from the Lee Sullivan cover of the latest Transformers.

Where’s Action Force? Perhaps this was when their new (canned) fortnightly comic was due and they’d have stopped appearing, and it was too late to put them back in (it was cancelled)? Or it’s something to do with timings for the Transformers strips, since the editor would be planning several months ahead. Who knows. Instead, alongside a continuing reprint were two new Transformers stories starring Micromasters. In this issue the plot involved the Decepticons’ difficulties in building microscopic components so they were trying to steal the Autobots’ secrets. The advantages of their tiny forms were really played up to and as a result they were so cocky. No wonder I loved them. The UK strips gave them proper personalities too, unlike the US ones.

It was rare for any ghosts to return in The Real Ghostbusters. Almost all of its stories were self-contained but on occasion we’d get a nice surprise and see a fan favourite once more. This happened this week. A giant gorilla movie monster returned from a previous prose story for a comic strip sequel, albeit much smaller and now working in Holywood. No prizes for guessing which role he was best suited for. Given the cover star for this week’s prose story this meant we basically had another themed issue. That’s three in a row! Could the comic make a home run next week?

The Punisher is the only other new release and that final issue of the superb Death’s Head is hanging on in there. The main story in the former certainly sounds exciting and it was such a shame that my reservation list at the newsagent was already maxed out. I didn’t want to cancel any of them to add The Punisher, so I missed out. The ‘Nam began its run as back up strip too, a series that sounded fascinating (especially the real time factor of its storytelling, at least initially) but which has escaped me thus far.

We’ve two adverts this week taken from the middle pages of Transformers so they’re both in black and white. A few weeks late, The Punisher finally gets promoted beyond the checklist with the famous quote that adorned the cover of the only issue I owned. Always found that funny! The other advert sees the very welcome return of the strip ads, this time for The Sleeze Brothers, a comic which was teased before release for longer than any child’s attention span. I’ve seen this advert in full colour in Death’s Head #5 (check it out in the brothers’ introduction post) but this is the only way it would appear in either of the comics I’m pulling these checklists from.

At the time of writing this post I’ve just recently reviewed Some Like It Fresh, the one-shot special released in 1991, two years after their mini-series was first released. It was a blast to read a new story featuring the dire detectives, so this advert is well timed right now and has brought a great big stupid grin to my face. Although, it’s been printed in Transformers two months after their series began and the comic was less than 32 pages, so I’m not sure how this slipped through at this stage. Oh well, who cares? It’s still fun.

I hope you enjoyed it too because that’s the last strip advert we’ll see in this series. Boooo! Oh well, next week we’ve three new ads for your perusal so don’t be missing out on them, as well as the latest checklist of course. See you in seven.

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SATURDAY 5th AUGUST 1989

John Marshall’s and Dave Harwood’s front page to The Real Ghostbusters doesn’t stand a chance this week, not when it’s alongside Nightbeat as a private eye on Andrew Wildman’s Transformers and Action Force cover!

Last time I said if this was the cover this week I’d be so excited I might read the issue again, despite having done so countless times before. Well, I did! The Big Shutdown was a superb two-part story that saw Autobot Headmaster Nightbeat investigating a disappearance, and with its classic detective movie clichés it’s a brilliant tale (and Nightbeat a fantastic character!). Alongside the terrifying new Decepticon Thunderwing, this was the beginning of writer Simon Furman introducing important new characters from his American strips to UK readers first. Our exclusive stories foreshadowed the US ones, added depth to proceedings and gave us a rich, memorably epic feel to the whole final couple of years of the comic. A genius move and a brilliant story in its own right.

Talking of stories coming across the Atlantic, the Ghostbusters were in England on holiday so all of this week’s tales were set there. Even the Dead True feature about local urban myths focused on the Tower of London. While The Real Ghostbusters comic’s stories were rarely longer than four or five pages, they would often find other ways of making them special such as these themed issues, or linking them together with an overall arc. Not that anything was made of this special issue on the cover, strangely enough. At least the “jolly spiffing” nature of it is plugged as such on the checklist.

Again, the need to tell us the titles and credits of every story reduces the brilliant Transformers contents to quick sentences that wouldn’t really entice new readers. The second issue of The Sleeze Brothers still didn’t get to be the big comic, despite their premiere issue holding the record for the number of weeks in the top spot. Nope, once again The Punisher weekly gets that honour. It was being given a big push so we can’t really blame them for giving it to him again; if it had been a new monthly we’d have expected it.

This week’s advert is actually for one of our mainstays. Even after 230 issues there’s no harm in plugging Marvel UK’s top-selling comic of the 1980s. In fact, I’d say it was about time. Both it and The Real Ghostbusters were rarely advertised post-launch, the excellent strip adverts notwithstanding (which you can see in weeks four and 21, although that was part of a publisher-wide push). I suppose when they’re already a hit there’s not much need. However, as fun as it was seeing one favourite comic pop up in the other, the advert feels somewhat phoned-in.

Like most of the publisher’s adverts there’s very little in the way of information and it relies solely on a few choice images. Nothing wrong with that whatsoever, the main purpose was to alert the younger readers of its existence and give a general feel of what to expect. On that level it does the job, but even when I was 11-years-old I couldn’t help thinking the image of Optimus Prime just looked wrong. That big gap above him where a speech balloon must’ve been made an otherwise powerful ad feel a bit slapped together. It’s not like the comic was short of images of him that would’ve fitted properly!

No adverts next week. In fact, for the rest of the year we seem to get a few weeks of a drought at a time and then suddenly we’ll be inundated. On this occasion we’ve only to wait two weeks until we get some more memory-firing images. In the meantime, next week there’s a bumper checklist to look forward to with our regulars, a special issue of a semi-regular and the final ever issue of a fan favourite. You can check it out next Wednesday to see what they are.

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SATURDAY 22nd JULY 1989

I hope you’re all feeling better than Ray does on John Marshall and Dave Hardwood’s The Real Ghostbusters cover. Although, unlike on this cover, weather of the opposite sort has a lot us feeling a bit bleh right now. More upbeat is Doubledealer on the cover to Transformers and Action Force by Jeff Anderson.

Inside the first of our two top Marvel UK comics this week the main strip was one of those tales where the ghost busting team didn’t bust the ghost, instead setting it free once they’d found out why it was haunting a particular place. In this case a private art gallery where the ghost’s signature had been removed by a fraudster from the paintings he’d created when alive. I liked this about the comic because having every story – no matter how varied – end with a blast from a proton gun could’ve gotten repetitive and boring.

The UK strip in Transformers this week was truly excellent! Doubledealer was a great laugh. He had no allegiance and instead played both sides in the war off against each other for profit. The strip was also chock full of Micromasters (the teeny tiny Transformers toys) that I was a huge fan of and one of my favourite toys of all, an Autobot Pretender Beast call Chainclaw, was the star. I told you last week I’d be raving about this comic more and more this year! Oh, and in Lew Stringer’s Combat Colin humour strip there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo from none other than OiNK’s Tom Thug! You can check that out elsewhere on the blog already.

The checklist was absent from The Real Ghostbusters this week, so it’s been taken from the middle pages of Transformers, hence why it’s in black and white.

For all of the excellence inside this week’s Transformers the checklist listed the wrong UK strip, instead detailing one from month’s ago! D’oh. Thundercats made a return to the top spot with what it calls a ”bumper strip issue” even though one of those was a reprint. Cliffhanging text stories when there’s a full month to wait between issues? Ouch. Then we get to Action Force Monthly and it was more important than the checklist made out.

It’s the same issue as we saw in the previous checklist, but in this week’s Transformers the editorial revealed the exciting news that with #17 the comic was to be renamed Action Force Fortnightly and would be presented in a new format. Did this mean it was no longer going to be exported to the States as G.I. Joe The European Missions and would return to a larger UK-only format? Who knows, because the issue in the checklist above would actually be the last, with no indication of such in the comic itself. Instead, readers would only realise when #16 never appeared.

The latest advert was for another Holiday Special, this time starring Fred et all in a comic dedicated to The Flintstones, clearly the most popular characters from Marvel’s fortnightly Cartoon Time. The advert took a leaf out of the previous Tom & Jerry one and used a random image from inside to make a strained attempt at a play on words to market the comic. 

Marvel UK’s comics adverts definitely fell into two distinct categories which I’d label the creative and the lazy. Thankfully, there are more of the former to come. Keep your eyes peeled for them on Wednesdays over the next few months, and I’ll see you next week.

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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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SATURDAY 1st JULY 1989

I just love Jeff Anderson’s cover to Transformers and Action Force #225. Shockwave was the most sinister of Decepticons and always looked terrifying on covers. By contrast, John Marshall and Dave Harwood’s piece for The Real Ghostbusters is as daft as ever. 

Inside Transformers, the reprints continued with more Death’s Head tales and the editorial finally came clean about the (gorgeously drawn) black and white pages. That Shockwave strip is actually a rather lighthearted affair, with the young and impudent Hot Rod’s anarchic style in battle raising a few genuine laughs. Aspects of Evil continued to be all the proof needed that the new story format could work a treat. Oh, and it’s all backed up with an Action Force story drawn by Todd (Spawn) McFarlane.

The main strip in The Real Ghostbusters proved extra funny to me this week thanks to who drew it. A story about haunted cars that transform into cuddly bears that come alive? The comedy from this spoof of Marvel UK’s other main comic is heightened thanks to incredible Transformers artist Andrew Wildman being the one to bring it all to life! This reminds me of John Geering drawing spoofs of Whizzer and Chips for OiNK! Two top issues as always. It’s just as well, because according to the checklist they’re the only new ones this week.

The Sleeze Brothers deserves all the glory of the Don’t Miss… spot every single week for the next six months as far as I’m concerned. I don’t remember knowing as a kid that it was a limited series and I’m not sure if that would’ve made me more eager to collect the set, or put off by the fact it wouldn’t run for long. In the end it wouldn’t matter, my attention span went on to the next thing by August 1989.

The advert this week is our first black and white entry. With so much to pack into each week of the new-look Transformers, a small half-page is all Action Force Monthly gets to promote itself. Although truth be told it does a damn fine job. As I said last time there’s more packed into this tiny little advert than most of the full-page ads recently combined! Images from various issues by various artists give us a flavour of what to expect inside. The only thing missing really is Snake Eyes!

It’s the summer, and just like real life things do seem to slow down at Marvel UK HQ over the next while, with the new Sleeze Brothers comic doing a fair amount of the heavy lifting for the checklists. But I do have very fond memories of Transformers and Action Force around this time. Despite how it seems to be generally perceived online, the reality was that it was going from strength-to-strength for me. From this point right here up to the end with #332 is probably my favourite time in the comic’s run, so it’s great fun to revisit it again through these posts.

Watch out for news about Transformers on the OiNK Blog towards the end of the summer, too. That’s all I’ll say for now. Oooh, I’m such a tease!

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THE MiGHTY MARVEL CHECKLiST: WEEK 48

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SATURDAY 24th JUNE 1989

On this day back in 1989 Marvel UK spoiled us with two ace covers for their top selling comics. Anthony Williams and Nick Abadzis joined forces for a funny yet thrilling environmental message for The Real Ghostbusters, while Geoff Senior stunned us two weeks in a row with his Transformers and Action Force page.

Back in week 42 I mentioned how one of that week’s Real Ghostbusters stories was a bit strange because it went against the comic’s previous environmental messages. Well, here we are just six weeks on from that strip flying against the comic’s stance and thankfully things have been corrected once again. Elsewhere, Slimer comes to Peter’s rescue when he brings home a haunted takeaway and the Dead True story this week is all about the Mary Celeste (although no mention of it being the fault of the Daleks – if you know you know).

In Transformers’ UK story (part two of Aspects of Evil) we learn the time fracture of Time Wars has healed itself, but the only way it could do so was to make sure it never happened in the first place, meaning Galvatron never travelled back in time (despite that being the reprint elsewhere in this issue). Everything that happened before still happened, but at the same time won’t happen. Brilliant, mature storytelling that treated the children as intelligent readers while setting things up for the next few years of the comic.

After a few weeks of repeated highlights it’s all brand new editions for the checklist this week. Transformers gets a bit of a by-the-numbers description compared to the rest, and in hindsight starting a so-called ‘Chinese Trilogy’ with a story called The Take-Away Terror in The Real Ghostbusters is as clichéd as it gets. (That’s me being kind, because that’s the least of its problems.) Action Force Monthly’s latest issue lived up to its ‘European Missions’ subtitle when it was exported to the US, but it’s not just a new issue that’s bagged the top spot, it’s a whole new (mini) series.

After several months of teaser ads The Sleeze Brothers were finally here! I bought the first issue as a kid and loved it, but my fickle attention span didn’t last a month so I never bought any more, despite the creative team being some of my favourites from The Real Ghostbusters. However, that has since been corrected, just a couple of years ago in fact right here on the blog. A link to the first issue’s review is below and from there you can check out the rest in that comic’s own section of the site. It was unlike anything I’d ever read before, that one issue sticking in my mind for decades after the fact.

Last week I mentioned how the Marvel Bumper Comic hadn’t been seen on the checklist for months. Well, this week’s contemporary advert sees it return in a somewhat strange comics merger. Much like how the monthly Slimer comic’s merge into The Real Ghostbusters felt weird because he was already in the comic and thus it didn’t need the “and Slimer” in the title, alien Alf had already been in the Bumper Comic too. They could’ve just continued printing his strips in it and nothing would’ve felt any different. But with his own comic ending Marvel UK would’ve seen the marketing potential in acting like it was a ‘new’ addition.

Next week the checklist pretty much stays the same but given the quality of their new comic I’ll forgive them this once. There’ll also be a tiny black and white advert (there’ll be more monochrome ads as we continue thanks to Transformers) that somehow still packed a bigger punch than those full-page, full-colour Popeye and Tom & Jerry ads recently. See you in seven more.

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