Ponquadragor returns on Anthony Williams and Dave Harwood’s cover! If you never collected The Real Ghostbusters this will be lost on you, and let’s face it if you never collected it you were already missing out big time.
In a turn up for the books it’s Transformers and Visionaries that brings us a light-hearted cover this week, courtesy of Jeff Anderson. Inside, the UK strip was now black and white. This saved money obviously, and having two shorter Transformers stories instead of one long one gave the comic the ability to run reprints that wouldn’t take up the whole comic. Together, these enabled Marvel UK to reduce the budget in a harsh comics environment. The story still wasn’t written for the new five-page format yet, but between this and the US strip we got a double dose of Dreadwind and Darkwing to soften the blow, the UK strip a prequel to the American one running at the same time, which was a neat idea.
Did I mind the black and white? Not at all. On the contrary, reading Fleetway’s comics I was used to the same length of strips and a mixture of colour and monochrome. Plus, once they started to be drawn for this new format the details really began to shine in the art! Across the way in the New York firehouse Peter and Egon found themselves in another dimension fighting side-by-side with our returning villain in a story which feels epic, even if it is only six pages long. It ends with a funny visual gag of the defeated demon on a trike being chased by Ponquadragor, the story then spilling over into Spengler’s Spirit Guide and the prose story, making it a rather special issue.
It’s presented on the checklist in a way that very much makes fun of the overly complicated names in fantasy novels and films of the day.
Hasbro had released a G.I. Joe action figure kids could only get by mail order after collecting tokens from the packaging of other figures. Nothing but a mishmash of parts from previously released toys, the Supertrooper never made it into the US comic but Marvel UK brought him to life in Action Force Monthly. I wonder if his story was a series of rehashed plot lines too? The excellent Death’s Head #6 was still on sale and the latest monthly Thundercats took the top spot yet again, with one of the new stories written by friend of the blog John Freeman, no less.
Both Action Force and Thundercats presenting “classic” tales should’ve been a sign of things to come for readers of the two main comics, both of which would “re-present” classic stories before the year was out. While Transformers had a long history to pull from, it was particularly galling to suddenly “have another chance to read” content in the much younger Real Ghostbusters. However, it was a sign of the times across the whole industry.
Now officially past the halfway point, there’ll be another checklist next week, and the week after, all the way until the festive season. See you in seven.
This is a fun little extra for Death’s Head fans out there, with emphasis on the words “fun” and “little”. We’ll get to that, first up though let’s set the scene by beginning at the, well, beginning of #173 of Marvel UK’sDoctor Who Magazine. I’m already taking umbrage though. How could they revert to the 70s logo when the latest series to have aired was the Sylvester McCoy era and my favourite series logo of all?
Oh well, inside there’s an interesting mixture of features and contemporary news, the latter of which reports on rumours surrounding the return of the show and much of it really was clutching at straws. The mag still had to report on it, after all we were in the pre-internet gossip days, so how else would the readers get their fix? It reminds me of the year or so before the Knight Rider sequel series launched in 2008, when I’d clamour for every juicy morsel of official news (but not spoilers, naturally).
On a side note, I loved everything I heard about that new Knight Rider and the pilot movie was ace. But when it went to series NBC gave the show runner position to the guy who created The Fast and the Furious and he didn’t have a clue about Knight Rider. We were SO close to something great! A great cast, a great car, a great premise… all ruined. At least we had the movie though. It makes me wonder what a series of Doctor Who would’ve looked like if its own pilot movie five years after this issue had gone to series.
Somewhat tied in with that news page is Lies Lies Lies, a feature looking back on the wild rumours and blatant lies people had made up about Doctor Who in the past just to get some attention. It’s somewhat ironic to have this in the same issue as that news page, don’t you think? I reminds me of social media today, or even discussion forums before that, and the things included here are the reason I no longer look out for future Knight Rider (or Doctor Who) news anymore. Some things never change.
Having recently watched all of the Seventh Doctor’s stories I don’t understand the hate it received from some corners of the fandom, but then again those corners are still there today moaning about the latest series so I still don’t understand them. I loved these stories. Stills of The Happiness Patrol in particular always made it look rather weird and I had a feeling of dread going into it, but it was fantastic!
Through this strange outer shell was a solid gold story and I particularly liked the feel of the dystopian future and the ending as described here, with the Doctor and Ace bringing sorrow, pain and sadness to a world forced to be happy. A happy ending through the importance of feeling sad. Again, it was brilliant! I found this feature about the writing of the story fascinating too. You should really give it a read.
Back in the 90s I collected Babylon 5 on VHS tapes, spending £8.99 for each volume of just two episodes. Or if we wanted to see the outtakes from Red Dwarf or find out how Thunderbirds was made we’d to fork out for additional tapes at about the same price. In the same decade the BBC had an idea which sounds equally bizarre when we’re so used to extras being include in our purchases today. Long before iPlayer The Eras Tapes were a way to get caught up on the earliest adventures with a rather random selection of episodes tied together by video links of Sean Pertwee and Sylvester McCoy. A real product of the time.
Elsewhere in this issue is a Fourth Doctor prose story and a humour strip written by Steve Noble (who I couldn’t find credits for when I wrote about Red Dwarf Smegazine) and drawn by OiNK’sKev F. Unfortunately, there are also the kind of Doctor Who episode reviews (of then-recent VHS releases) that are more suited to today’s internet than the official mag. Much like certain modern online reviews they’re overly long, overly negative and the reviewer is more interested in promoting themselves and how ‘clever’ they are than writing honestly. There are even letters of complaint about this reviewer!
But anyway, for Death’s Heads fans the wait is over. Party Animals is the issue’s comic strip, written by Gary Russell, pencilled by Mike Collins (Zoids, Transformers, Captain Britain), inked by Steve Pini (Knights of Pendragon, Bloodlines) and lettered by Gary Gilbert (Transformers, Thundercats, 2000AD). Gary Russell would have a huge career in the universe of the Doctor, including becoming editor of this magazine from the next year, script editor on The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood, and producer on Big Finish’s audio dramas.
So just why is this issue of Doctor Who Magazine in this section of the blog? In this strip the Seventh Doctor is visiting a bar at the centre of the space-time vortex run by Bonjaxx, whose birthday it is. Everyone from across space and time frequents this bar and have turned out to celebrate. Friends and enemies drink side-by-side as the Doctor and Ace meet two mysterious strangers, the Doctor and the other man exchanging a cryptic conversation while Ace and Ria get caught up in the inevitable 80s movie-style bar brawl.
In the end we find out the other man is a future incarnation of the Doctor, which is rather disappointing. His face may have been based on Nicholas Briggs from Big Finish (who supplies the current show’s Dalek voices) but this depiction does him no favours, the character coming across as rather boring. Even his costume makes him look more like a maître d, so the twist in the tale is a bit flat as a result. But the real highlight here was always going to be the bar itself and the wonderful array of cameos for readers to spot and their funny interactions both before and during the fight.
As you can see, our resident Freelance Peacekeeping Agent was also taking a well deserved break, at least until a Meep got a bit angry and things escalated as only bar fights can. Death’s Head is only in a few panels but he makes his presence felt and thankfully this was before his horrible redesign for Death’s Head II. It’s an insane little piece, although I’ve no doubt there are some who took it far too seriously and either saw it as proof these characters all existed in the same universe, got annoyed that it was “timeline/universe inaccurate” or who went to great lengths to explain how they could all be together.
Relax! It’s just a bit of fun. After all, that’s what comics are for. It even has Bart Simpson in it and some Daleks actually enjoying themselves in the background! It was a lovely surprise stumbling upon this Death’s Head cameo then purchasing it for the blog. Not only because of him, but also the amount of time I spent pouring over every panel to see who I could recognise. There were some genuine moments of laughter to be had when spotting them.
Finishing off the rest of the magazine I wanted to touch upon Enlightening, a superb interview with director Fiona Cumming, especially as it counters some corners of today’s online world. There were so many hateful men complaining about seeing women’s names on writing and directing credits during Jodie Whittaker’s and Ncuti Gatwa’s runs but the 1980s got there first. I was pleasantly surprised to see so many in the credits during this era. How little the sexist trolls actually know, eh?
There are some great nuggets of information here. It’s strange to read how little the writer was involved in the production back then, or that much like today whole seasons were filmed out of order. The latter is testament to Janet Fielding’s and Sarah Sutton’s talent in acting out their characters getting to know each other even though they’d been working together for months already. There’s a lovely Jon Pertwee story too, as well as some very clever examples of using set design to get around the tight budgets.
I certainly wouldn’t have said Doctor Who was famous for its incidental music back then, some of it was atrocious, especially in the 70s. However, in Sylvester’s years it really was superb, with each story individually tailored for and I loved hearing the theme tune woven into the episodes in various ways, something we’d never had before and wouldn’t get again until Jodie’s era. It’s a great article so I’ve included it all here for you to read.
Yes, I really did fork out for an old Doctor Who Magazine because Death’s Head was the star of three panels of a comic strip! As a fan of Doctor Who I was never going to complain though. I always enjoy reading contemporary coverage of such things, even despite the negatives mentioned above. Thankfully the positives (most of all the strip itself, of course) more than make up for any shortcomings. A fun little addition to the Death’s Head section of the blog, yes?
The Real Ghostbusters didn’t have the most exciting of covers this week despite having Anthony Williams’ talent behind it. Over on Transformers and Visionaries meanwhile, for a few weeks the covers would remind readers they now had two stories for the Cybertronians inside.
John Stokes returned for #214’s cover and while the Mecannibals were a fun villain the hyping of a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fight between Megatron and a Decepticon not mentioned until now is a choice. The American story wins out this week thanks to shady subterfuge from Dreadwind and Darkwing and the funny way they bicker while in their combined form. As a teen it was extra exciting because I’d previously played with the toys of these characters at my friend’s house.
In New York, hair cuttings on a barber’s floor came back to life and, hilariously, Slimer got a job as a ghostwriter! Brilliant. The Real Ghostbusters’ creative team had the best imaginations. Also, after previous issues had contradicted the cartoon, an answer to a letter references the episode that explained the change to their uniforms compared to the movie’s, so someone was paying attention after all. Okay, it’s checklist time.
Yes, Marvel UK, you could say more for Death’s Head. This is a bit too close to that dreaded and overused “Nuff said” phrase they seemed to trot out ad nauseam in their editorials around this time. It was a great issue and this really doesn’t sell it, although it must’ve been difficult only having one paragraph for each of five comics. Alongside the continuing presence of Action Force Monthly #11 is Doctor Who Magazine, which finally seems to be a regular addition to the list.
It’s taken long enough, although I suppose you could argue this is a comics checklist and DWM is a magazine, so that could be why it wasn’t featured for the first several months. Coincidentally enough, I’ve been watching Doctor Who from the very beginning (the very beginning from 1963) for a couple of years and I’ve just watched Silver Nemesis for the first time about a month ago. It was a good ‘un so I can understand why it proved so popular.
I never did collect the Collected Comics series for my two main Marvel comics, although it was one of the Transformers specials that got me into it in the first place. As a kid, once I was reading the weeklies I didn’t see the point in collecting stories I’d already read. As an adult though, I appreciated getting the chance to enjoy classic tales all in one go and catching up on certain story arcs at regular intervals in my Transformers real time read through.
Finally, that Spring Specials advert certainly showed the variety in Marvel’s range, didn’t it? I’m surprised they put them all together on one page rather than separating them into genres or age groups. As it stands, I’ve no recollection of Snorks or Wimple Village, however I do remember Care Bears being on TV Sunday mornings, I’ve reviewed the Visionaries already and I owned that Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends poster mag. Hmm, now that I see this I do remember buying the ‘Collected Stories’ (as they were called) for Thoma, so that’s made a liar out of me!
That’s us for another week and we’re now officially halfway through the lifespan of The Mighty Marvel Checklist. See you in seven.
It was an exciting week as a Transformers reader this week in 1989, which John Stokes’ cover sums up perfectly. Meanwhile, the perfect pairing of Andy Lanning and Dave Harwood worked their funny magic with The Real Ghostbusters.
My friends who were long-time Transformers readers weren’t too enamoured with the new three-story format in the newly-retitled Transformers and Visionaries. We now had a pair of five-or-six-page Transformers stories (and the same size of back up) every week but they preferred the previous 11-page strip and found it hard to adjust. I was used to Fleetway’s action comics though, so this felt like an upgrade over the previous format, even if it took a while before the UK strips were written for the new format.
Visionaries was yet another reprint of the origin tale (to give the American G.I. Joe comic time to get ahead again) but that didn’t dampen things for me as a teen. Although, now I think a reprint of an early G.I. Joe from years before may have been better, as many readers would’ve read this back up strip just the previous Christmas! As a whole it all felt fresh, new and exciting though, and would lead to what would eventually become my favourite period of time with the comic. It also kicked things off with the superbly titled, “Guess Who the Mecannibals Are Having for Dinner?” Great fun.
Obviously, this issue was going to take the top spot on the checklist. It was a mammoth change to such a long-running comic. Yes, it was to save money down the road amid rising production costs. By changing to this format they could churn out the British strips in black and white and run some reprints while still having new strips for the readers, but young me wasn’t aware of all of that and it deserved this fanfare regardless.
Alongside The Real Ghostbusters are the same editions of Marvel UK’s monthly Action Force and Thundercats as last week but we did have some brand spanking new comics adverts. Cartoon Time was essentially the Flinstones and Friends comic from earlier checklists in all but name. That had made it to 24 issues before cancellation and was basically rebranded as Cartoon Time, each issue’s main title relating to a different Hanna Barbera character with the “Cartoon Time” banner off to the side or top.
It certainly proved popular, running for 40 fortnightly issues before turning monthly. This would normally signal the beginning of the end for a comic but Cartoon Time continued for another 38 monthly issues after that, so fair play. Our other advert is for a Doctor Who graphic novel collecting a strip from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine, starring Colin Baker’sSixth Doctor and Frobisher, his penguin companion. No, really.
In reality (well, you know what I mean) Frobisher could take on any form but for some reason preferred to be a talking penguin, and he and the Doctor found themselves on a Death Ship falling off the edge of the universe. The 80s TV show couldn’t have brought this to the screen! It sounds wonderfully inventive and I’m aware it stands in high regard with fans even today.
There are new issues of some top Marvel UK monthlies in next week’s checklist and a whole host of Spring Specials in the ads to jog your memories. See you then!
Dave Huxley may have only contributed to three issues of OiNK but that didn’t stop the Crickey! fanzine from asking him to talk about the comic back in 2008. Dedicated to the nostalgia of classic British comics, Crikey! kicked off as a quarterly before it quickly became bi-monthy, eventually added more colour and ended up with a proper distribution deal before distributors Borders collapsed, taking the magazine with it.
I’ll admit this is the only issue I’ve read and that’s because I saw the OiNK logo on it while browsing eBay, and the corresponding article is one of the main highlights of the issue. It isn’t an interview, it’s actually written by Dave himself and at times it can be wonderfully insightful. Sadly, it kicks off with the Viz comparison, despite that comic not being mainstream at the time nor an influence on the OiNK creative team. And, Tom Thug a “Viz-like character”?
Interestingly, Dave wasn’t hired by the team to create his first piece, the Mona Lisow (the name given to it by the editors), instead he sent it in unsolicited and they saw in him a potential part of the team. He returned in #43, my favourite regular issue and the second Christmas edition with The Hamformers and there’s a funny story included here about his kids appearing on that one.
Dave says he had more ideas to come after his third and final piece, The Statue of Piggery in #55 but never had the chance to develop them due to OiNK’s cancellation. Although, since his first page appeared in #36 and OiNK lasted until its 68th issue I wish he’d developed them a bit quicker! While it’s an interesting article, unfortunately there’s a glaring error included.
I’m not talking about some of the grammatical mistakes or even the misspelling of Mark Rodgers’ name. While Crikey! had a habit of including factual errors in its articles in its early issues, when someone who worked on a comic (albeit briefly) is the guest writer I suppose you’d expect it to be accurate. Unfortunately, the fanzine’s lack of fact-checking is clear when Dave spins the tale of why OiNK ended up cancelled.
Yes, the Janice and John strip did lead to a complaint being lodged with the Press Council and W.H.Smith (R.I.P.) did top-shelf it, but that strip was published right back at the beginning, in #7. It wasn’t the reason the comic was cancelled nearly two-and-a-half-years later! That myth of the complaint bringing about the end of OiNK did circulate at one time though, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too harsh on Dave either.
However, the fact remains that it’s just not true. I’ve covered the evolution and eventual cancellation of OiNK in-depth throughout its real-time read through. Put basically, when Fleetway took over all of IPC’s comics they placed them into sales groups and if the combined sales of each group wasn’t good enough they’d all be cancelled. But OiNK survived its group’s culling; its sales were impressive to IPC (about 100,000 per issue) but Fleetway wanted more. The publisher changing it to a weekly and then to a larger monthly were well-meaning changes but ultimately they are what led to a decrease in sales, long after the complaint shenanigans.
Also, I was aware of Dan Dare and knew who Mary Whitehouse was, so they were hardly included for mature readers.
Despite these errors it’s still nice to read how OiNK was held in such high regard by one of its contributors many years later, even when he only had a very limited amount of work for it. While it doesn’t apply to OiNK, I do agree with Dave’s final sentiment. It’s something that’s still very much prevalent today.
While we’re here I spotted a few little moments elsewhere in this issue that might be of particular interest to OiNK Blog readers. In an article about Warrior comic V for Vendetta is included (although I think the writer has twisted the story to suit his own politics) along with some of David Lloyd’s artwork. This was between 1982 and 1985, the same time David was producing the gorgeous artwork for the first two Knight Rider Annuals that have featured on the blog.
In a quick look at the short-lived Thunder we have brief mentions of Dusty Binns and The Terrible Trail to Tolmec, drawn by Ring Raiders’Geoff Campion (also misspelled) and Wildcat’sMassimo Belardinelli respectively, and both artists also contributed to licenced anthology horror comic Super Naturals at different stages.
Elsewhere, there are a few articles about girls’ comics, one of which asks why girls enjoyed them so much? It seems to have been too much to ask that Crikey! hire a woman to answer the question, though. Gil Page, who was still working for Egmont at the time spends much of an article about classic comics bitching about the modern market, which is a bit surprising given his employer. Unfortunately, there’s quite a bit of this sort of thing throughout, which dampens the reading experience. For example, an otherwise interesting article about Commando loses me the moment the writer starts to complain about today’s “politically correct world”. Sigh.
This has been a curious little read. I’ve heard a lot of good things about later issues, especially when other comics professionals came in to write about their work and I can’t fault the ambition of the comics fans who put this together in the first place. While this particular issue hasn’t really been for me, it’s always good to see OiNK get some love long after it was gone.
This week’s Marvel UK cover for The Real Ghostbusters by Brian Williamson and Dave Harwood was overshadowed by the strap line for me. Also, at the time I didn’t realise this week’s Transformers and Action Force cover was something of a big deal.
That’s because it was drawn by John Stokes (Doctor Who, Star Wars, The Invisibles), making his first return to the weekly in three years. The story was great, focusing on the mental toll of being the human part of a Head Master, while the big changes coming next week were hyped with a full-page Next Issue promo. However, it contained no text or details, just three comics panels. The editorial made a big deal about Visionaries returning without mentioning it’d be a reprint. How very on brand after last week’s checklist post (link below).
So yes, that Atari ST competition in The Real Ghostbusters really takes me back. I always loved the look of that machine and was in awe of how a friend used his to produce incredible music, albeit a few years after this, so I never entered at the time. Strip-wise, after contradicting the cartoon last week the comic now contradicts itself by featuring Father Time, forgetting he’d already appeared in a completely different guise in an earlier issue. It was still fun though, as always. On to the checklist.
Death’s Head remains because let’s face it we all should’ve bought every single issue, it was that good and deserved more success. There are also a few details for you there about the sheer amount of stories The Real Ghostbusters comic could include in its 24 pages every week, while Transformers’ checklist entry does little to sell its fantastic, human story beyond a basic action piece. But hey, they had to get the kids interested so we won’t hold that against them.
Action Force Monthly was Marvel UK’s attempt to repackage their content back to the States (as ‘G.I. Joe The European Missions‘), so they had a forgivable excuse for including some reprints. Some of the regular features from the ol’ weekly a couple of years previous were also making their way back into the comic, giving it a feeling of being in rude health. Such a shame in five short months it would just… stop! But those UK stories were superb, the few that I’ve read anyway.
A short one this week but the adverts return in seven days, featuring a dog, a cat and a penguin! You’ll see what that’s all about in week 37 of The Mighty Marvel Checklist.
OiNK’sDavy Francis (Cowpat County, Greedy Gorb, Doctor Madstarkraving) and I both live in Belfast and I’ve been lucky enough to meet up with him on a few occasions now, whether that’s over a coffee or a Greggs. Always a great laugh, on one of those days he very generously sent me home with a heavy shoebox full of a random selection of magazines which Davy or friends of his had contributed various comic strips to.
Instantly I thought this would make for a great post on the OiNK Blog. A selection of new gags from Davy? What’s not to love, right? However, not only did I discover so much good material by him that I’d need more than one post just for those, there was also plenty from other OiNK cartoonists! So in the end there was only one solution, a series of posts about Davy’s Shoebox.
There are some publications with multiple issues and they’ll get their own instalments in this series, but I’m kicking things off with a bit of variety first and the selection of other random titles. We begin with Red Dwarf Smegazine from Fleetway. Davy appeared in two of the issues in the box including this very final issue, #9 of volume two.
Alongside articles and interviews the magazine had a selection of strips, some adapted episodes while others were new adventures for guest characters such as Ace Rimmer and Duane Dibbley. Lasting for 23 issues altogether, the last issue is double-length to include conclusions of all the strips and any already-written features. As such, Davy’s Cred Dwarf strip gets twice as much space as in previous issues, hence why I’ve chosen to highlight this last instalment.
Written by Steve Noble (who I can’t find any other credits for) and lettered by Woodrow Pheonix (The Sumo Family, Ecco the Dolphin, Sugar Buzz!), it’s set inside the Total Immersion Red Dwarf Videogame from the Back to Reality episode (a fan favourite), hence why the regular characters look the way they do. Here, the end of the story is all just a long walk to a Christmas pun and the final panel does sum things up somewhat, doesn’t it?
Davy wasn’t the only OiNK alumni in the pages of the Smegazine. Kev F Sutherland (Peter Porter Post Office Sorter, Rotten Rhymes, Meanwhile…) contributed his art to the Androids spoof soap opera and in the final issue a Madvertisement of sorts, Dwarf Eager, coloured by Lucy Allen. There’s something very ‘GBH’ (OiNK’s spoof mail order company) about this and Kev has certainly packed plenty into this little half-page. It’s the final strip of the magazine’s run.
Not to be confused with the clothes shop of the same name, DV8 was an independent newspaper that folded up to fit on the magazine shelves (like the previously-covered Speakeasy). Focussing on Belfast’s cultural scene it included a lot of comics gag pages and even a photo strip from the team behind the Hole in the Wall Gang. It was released monthly between 1992 and 1996. The editorial team received paramilitary threats when an issue released after the IRA ceasefire had a union flag in Irish colours on the cover. It folded soon after.
This was the first on-sale issue after a free preview. A lot of the pages contain cartoon strips from one artist and just a few pages in we’re treated to Davy’s. As you can instantly see from the very first panel this is much more adult-orientated output from Davy, although it’s still very much the same sense of humour we all grew up with in OiNK, just for a different audience.
It’s very ‘Northern Ireland’ too. I did chuckle at the “Didn’t feel a thing”! Across the way Davy’s good friend and fellow Uncle Pigg employee, Ed McHenry (Wally of the West, Igor and the Doctor, OiNK puzzle pages) gets his own space to shine and right in the middle are two little individual panels that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the pages of OiNK, especially the one with the sheep. Ed’s other strips are more adult but I wanted to show these off on their own because it felt like I was reading new OiNK material.
The final publication I want to pull from this time is in a similar format, at least physically.
Created by several cartoonists fed up of how they were being treated by the industry, Duck Soup was another independent newspaper-like magazine that very much feels like the funnies section we used to get in newspapers, only here it’s all funnies! It’s a rather strange reading experience given the large format and the physical feel of it, while the reading experience is very much that of a comic. It’s definitely unique, that’s for sure.
It was distributed nationally but WHSmith only took it on for a six week trial then cancelled all their orders when they deemed the content unsuitable, again deciding what the rest of us were allowed to read and find funny (this was a year before they’d throw a hissy fit over OiNK). What a shame they’re no longer on the high street, eh? Sadly, this resulted in the magazine folding after six issues because, despite its popularity, without Smith’s distribution they just couldn’t break even.
Davy doesn’t actually feature in this issue of Duck Soup but some of his OiNK pals do and that’s why he’s kept it safe in this box. Up first is Ed again and on his first page Girth stood out because I recognised him from the very last issue of OiNK, published over two years later. Not only that, but upon refreshing my memory with that issue I see he was actually named Girth there too. He was a one-off in OiNK so this was a nice surprise.
Later, Ed brings us more substantial strips including Norbert Wibble Schoolboy Detective, who also appeared in DV8. It’s just plain daft and I was smirking away to myself as the captions took over more and more of each panel, then laughed when I read those final points! While the next character I want to highlight may not have gone on to appear in OiNK like Girth did, he still feels very familiar.
Jeremy Banx’s (Burp, Mr. Big Nose, Butcher Watch) Norman Spittall has a strikingly familiar appearance and in these random life moments feels somewhat like a precursor to Mr. Big Nose, although they were very much different characters. Norman got his own book and animated series called The Many Deaths of Norman Spittall in 1997, so luck definitely didn’t improve after Duck Soup! I’ll have to grab a copy of the book sometime if these examples are anything to go by.
The much-missed Tony Husband (OiNK co-creator/editor, Horace ‘Ugly Face’ Watkins, writer of too much OiNK goodness to mention) also pops up which was a lovely, somewhat emotional surprise. Tony’s work in OiNK often didn’t shy away from pointing out the wrongs of the world to its young readers and how Tony felt about certain topics, particularly those involving animals. Here, he combines this with his hatred for war. In fact, the mid-80s fear of the threat of nuclear war is at the forefront of many of the cartoons throughout this issue from many of the contributors.
It’s quite striking how similar some of this is to comments we can read online today, particularly the similarity between Frank the frog and a certain type of person found of socials. It’s also striking how this could easily have been printed today and it’d be just as relevant. That would be a depressing thought if it weren’t for Tony’s ability to make us laugh at ourselves.
The middle pages are of the same higher grade as the cover and open out into a spoof of The Sun (surely already a spoof newspaper). On the back of this are more cartoons, some of which are by Pete Dredge (Master T, Dimbo, Young Arfur in Buster) under the banner War Cry. This pull-out of sorts is packed full of such gags, bringing some levity to a time when adults weren’t as blissfully unaware of the Cold War as I was as a child.
This has been a fun start to delving into this box of treats, hasn’t it? Next time, we’ll be concentrating on the many issues of Electric Soup in it (they must’ve run out of ducks). I’d never heard of the publication before and according to the covers it’s “Scotland’s Adult Humour Comic”, so expect to move further away from the kind of stuff we’d find in OiNK. However, I’m sure it’ll still be ‘very Davy Francis’. That’ll be in a couple of months’ time.
Kicking things off for Marvel UK’s two best-selling comics are covers from Brian Williamson and Bambos Georgiou for The Real Ghostbusters and Andrew Wildman for Transformers and Action Force, the latter of which reminds me of a school trip to London in P7.
While there we had to visit Hamley’s toy store, naturally. I bought Ecto-2 while my friend Roger bought Decepticon Pretender Beast, Carnivac. For the remainder of the trip Roger kept it sealed in its box, fearful of losing anything if he opened it before we got home. I didn’t have the patience for that so I took my Ecto-2 helicopter out of its box for a closer inspection… and promptly lost the missile launcher!
Anyway, Carnivac would become a favourite character of mine later in the comic’s run when he’d team up with the Autobot survivors of the recent Time Wars and Underbase Saga storylines. Back to this week and the Ghostbusters comic has a strip inside it that fans would find somewhat confusing. On the checklist it simply states they’re at a haunted film set but that’s only half the story.
They’re actually filming the live-action movie, with them in the starring roles. That’s weird enough, but in the cartoon they’d already visited the set of the film in which the original actors were playing the roles. It was a fan favourite episode (it even contained movie footage) so, combine this with Week 32’sSpengler’s Spirit Guide and it’s clear the comic’s team weren’t researching the show their work was based on.
Despite being an excellent issue and a sequel of sorts to a strip in Doctor Who Magazine, the first appearance of Death’s Head’s fifth issue wasn’t important enough to knock the first monthly Thundercats issue off the top spot. Thundercats seems to be getting the ‘Don’t Miss’ spot more than any other comic. They were really trying to push it, weren’t they? What else were they pushing at us this week, adverts-wise? Two Spring Specials, that’s what.
First up is Droids. This wasn’t an extra edition of a regular comic, rather a one-off special importing an American strip to the UK for the first time. Droids was a cartoon Star Wars spin-off released in the States as a companion series to Ewoks, the latter of which I remember my friends watching. Toys, comics and various other merchandise were all created for what would surely be a sure-fire hit, but in the end Droids only lasted one season of 13 episodes and a special, the comic also cancelled after eight bi-monthly issues so it never got beyond this edition and some Marvel Bumper Comic appearances this side of the Atlantic.
At least Droids brought us a strip we hadn’t seen yet, our next Spring Special was another matter entirely. I remember stumbling upon this edition of the Visionaries comic by accident, buying it immediately and loving it. I’d missed out on the monthly but had devoured the annual the previous Christmas. Little did I know this Spring Special was pretty much just the fifth and final issue of the comic repackaged with minimal changes.
Even the advert was recycled from the one used to promote the first issue the previous year. Released at the same time Visionaries returned to Transformers as the back up strip (a third printing of the origin story within 12 months), this was probably why the special was released. A quick copy and paste of a whole issue and any new readers would hopefully start picking up Transformers as a result. You can check out just how similar it was to the last issue in its review, link below.
After what seemed like a bumper year for Marvel UK in 1988, a year in which we got constant news of new comics and which saw me spending a lot of my parents’ money on them, not many survived and 1989 was turning out to be a year of reprints and big changes to some of their biggest titles. More on that soon!
This Duncan Fegredo (Crisis, Hellboy, Lucifer) cover takes me back to travelling through Scotland on a train during an Easter holiday as a teenager. I’d flicked through a close friend’s issues before but this was the first Aliens I owned. I’d never read anything like it and I loved every page, even if I was a bit lost in the continuing stories at times. It’d be the only one I’d read until 2024 because it was also the last before its publisher, Dark Horse International went bust.
While Jurassic Park would get a reprieve and return after a few months under the Manga imprint (at least for a little while), DHI’s flagship title wasn’t so lucky and #23 would never appear. As you can see from the editorial it must’ve happened quickly because it’s business as usual. With hindsight, there’s even a somewhat unfortunate opening sentence from Dick Hansom, standing in for regular editor Cefn Ridout for the month.
Despite previous promises, Crusade hasn’t returned so we remain two parts away from the end, Colonial Marines has been with us since #9 and we’re still several months of issues away from wrapping that up, and there’s a new eight-part UK strip from Ian Edginton (Batman: No Man’sLand, The War of the Worlds, The Terminator) and wonderful Transformers artist (also Judge Dredd, Hellblazer) Will Simpson. Nice to see Northern Ireland get a wee mention, too. Although I was mistaken back in #9‘s review when my ageing memory told me this last issue also had a prose story!
Rogue gets 13-pages to spread its wings yet very little of consequence happens, but that’s only a complaint in the context of this being the final issue. Normally, I’d be praising it for the characters it establishes really well here, particularly the two female pilots. But knowing this is all we’ll get does affect things, which is unfair on the strip I know, but it can’t be helped.
One thing I really don’t like isn’t unique to Rogue, it’s across the whole Alien comics franchise (and the fourth film, Resurrection) and it’s how the aliens are now seen as a commodity. Yes, I know the company is always after them for their biological weapons potential but in a lot of the strips that’s already been successfully accomplished. They’re even milked (for want of a better term) for a recreational drug, reducing these supposedly terrifying monsters to cattle.
The best stories have been those that remember how the aliens are meant to be seen, in my eyes anyway. The human politicking, the nature of human greed and the associated social commentary are some of my favourite aspects of the Alien series, I just think it can be done without desensitising us to the xenomorphs. In fact, Rogue begins with a narration that explains humanity have forgotten we were once the prey instead of the predator, but it only acts to remind me of my above points.
One such boss, Ernst Kleist has sent Marines to recover an alien and berates them when one is killed, despite the fact it had ripped one of them apart! Will’s art, coloured by Robbie Busch (Babylon 5, Black Panther, Huntress) is great and pilots Zajer and Deegan are enjoyable. I assume they’ll end up fighting for their lives at some point as the main characters. For now, their banter is enjoyable while they bring a man called Mr. Kray to meet Kleist, although there’s no indication yet as to why. However, he does describe his trip with them as “enlightening” to Kleist, who just looks down his nose at the pair.
There’s definitely potential here. If you’ve read the full story (or indeed, any of the unfinished tales here) please don’t tell me what happens, I intend to finish them someday. After this there’s a competition to be a Colonial Marine at Alien War, despite the criticisms the comic had levelled at it. Then it’s on to our final slice of contemporary sci-fi news. I’ve enjoyed Dave Hughes’Motion Trackers and my trips back to the mid-90s, the latest releases and the predictions for the then-future. Here, the Aliens toys do look fun but the column even states these are for kids so you have to wonder why they existed when the films were all ’18’-certificates.
That ‘Pixelvision’ short isn’t some cool retro-styled computer graphic film, despite its name and the fact it prominently features a computer game. It was a children’s film camera manufactured by Fisher Price, believe it or not. Director Michael Almereyda’s short documentary-of-sorts is on his website, although don’t expect to be too thrilled by it and prepare to struggle to hear what the two boys are saying. Frustratingly, you’ll want the camera to sit still while showing clips from the Alien³ game instead of all the stylistic shaking.
Colonial Marines starts a new chapter and it’s all change for the creative team. For the UK comic this is part 14 of what was meant to be a 24-part series and isn’t it typical that one of the best episodes of the whole thing so far arrives in the final issue. Writing, layouts and inks are by Paul Guinan, pencils by Tony Akins, colouring by Pamela Rambo (Preacher, Star Wars, Y: The Last Man) and lettering by Clem Robins.
There are some great new characters here. I’m simply loving all of the robots who bring much needed levity to the comic. The art is a huge step up too and the human characters are once again easily identifiable so things are easier to follow. But why did they have to do the dirty to Billy? He could’ve been a star! These new robots and the synth are part of Beliveau’s secret group hiding out on a dirt ball orbiting the planet, where he’s stashed a secret supply of his company’s weapons for the inevitable fight ahead.
So, I thought he was the obvious mysterious bad guy to begin with but I couldn’t be happier to have been proven wrong. I love well-written misdirection. Marine Chen’s addiction to the alien jelly almost causes more disaster but I was less interested in that than the introduction of this hideout and its wonderful array of new additions. Like Rogue before it, this is about establishing characters and a scenario more than moving the plot forward.
But it still had me gripped thanks to this mechanical ragtag team and I’m gutted I won’t see them develop further. The overall Colonial Marines story had gone a bit stale in my opinion, possibly from the lack of an overall guiding hand (as I detailed last time) but this has reignited my interest again, just in time for us to say goodbye. I won’t forgive them for Billy, though.
The last Technical Readout is for those big-ass guns used in the movie that had to be attached to their users by a hip mechanism, then it’s time to move on to our final strip of the read through, the still-confusingly titled Aliens: Alien. Just eight pages but there are some great moments here. The hunting party keep failing to track the alien properly but for the readers its presence is always felt in neat little panels like this one below. You can also see what I meant last time about how Vickie Williams’ lettering hints at an alien tongue.
The teenager sees the men gruesomely taken out one-by-one, and even when they do manage to spear the monster they’re unaware of what its body contains. He tries to save his mentor by dragging him across the desert, desperate for somewhere to hide in the barren landscape. While the xenomorph retreats to heal, they come across a strange, alien (to them) structure in which they take shelter. But this sanctuary has more to it. In the morning he steps outside and, while he doesn’t realise it, we can see it’s a crashed spaceship. We also see a broken sleep chamber and the source of the xenomorph, which he remains blissfully unaware of.
This moment is a classic bit of Alien atmosphere. Things end when he spots a human in their full space gear, face obscured, making their way back. With a “To be concluded next issue” adding to my frustration, this neat this tale leads us into a four-page interview with no less than Bishop himself, Lance Henriksen. When I bought these comics for the read through I thought the cover was familiar, but it was the inclusion of this interview that confirmed this was the issue I’d bought as a teenager.
It’s a fascinating read, although it does annoy me somewhat that Dave Hughes concludes Alien³ didn’t work when he’s been happy to promote it in the comic and even work on the spin-off mini-series. I’m saddened that Lance didn’t like the film and I wonder what he’d have thought of the special edition released later, which also confirmed the Bishop cameo mystery. I’ve a funny memory of this article. Back in 1994 I was disappointed his role in the Super Mario Bros movie wasn’t mentioned anywhere, but seeing as how his cameo in that amounted to one line and about ten seconds of screen time I can understand why.
While I remember my surprise at seeing Bishop pop up briefly in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I’d forgotten all about him being in The Terminator until I saw it for the first time in years a few weeks ago on TV. There are a multitude of roles that sound interesting here, as well as some truly awful schlock horror. I’m intrigued with the idea of what The Terminator could’ve been like with him in the title role, although of course I think Arnie’s depiction is perfect.
Lance states the audience’s familiarity with him playing villains kept them on their toes with Aliens, but I think he’s selling himself short. That was the first film I saw him in and how he played the role did that anyway. I agree completely with him about that scene with Hudson, too. With the gift of hindsight of what he later directed (including the restoration of his original Alien³ vision), leaving David Fincher out of the great directors list doesn’t seem fair. It’s an interesting interview nevertheless, before we round things off with Bug Hunt and the Checklist.
As with Star Wars and Dracula before it, Total Carnage bit the dust after ten issues, and after we had to miss out on the AvP strip so it could print it instead! Gotta say Alex Impey’s complaint about “scrubby little sound effects or speech” ruining the strips is… a unique opinion. The Checklist shows us what might’ve been with #23. Crusade, Rogue developments and the conclusion of the teen alien’s story. Even a Chris Halls cover! Damn. Then, just to confuse things further the next page rounds the final issue off with subscription offers for all of DHI’s freshly canned range.
I have mixed emotions about the end of Aliens. It’s always disappointing when a comic just ends with no proper conclusion, even more so when it’s an anthology. All-in-all it’s been a fun ride. Nothing truly scary but plenty of atmospheric moments. The stories didn’t always hit the spot, but when they did they really did and the good definitely outweighed the bad. It ended because the publisher itself imploded, so its premature end shouldn’t reflect on its quality.
As it stands, Dark Horse International’s UK Aliens comic wasn’t just a flagship title for the publisher, for me it stands as a flagship for the UK comics scene of the 90s. Big, bold, brash, adult, gripping and, despite its limited subject matter, hugely varied. I’m so happy I finally got to read it all. I just wish teenage me hadn’t missed out. He’d have been thrilled with it!
A funny cover by Brian Williamson and Bambos Georgiou to mark the Easter school holidays for readers of The Real Ghostbusters, while those buying Transformers and Action Force were probably gasping in horror rather than giggling, thanks to Andrew Wildman’s shocking image.
The free gift was a Slimer-shaped jelly, a special sweet treat for that particular Saturday morning. I loved those things! I’d keep the plastic moulds to fill with my favourite drinks and stick in the freezer on warm summer days. Just me? Inside, a story about haunted shopping trollies explains a lot about those at my local supermarket, and Bad News was a very funny tale of a TV-addict ghost watching his own bust live on the gogglebox.
Cover artist Andrew is also a news story on the editorial page inside Transformers with the news of the birth of his third child, which was a lovely little moment in the comic. In the main strip, Starscream looks much more like last issue’s cover and it’s a cracking read, one of the very best of the American stories. It also sees the beginning of the fascinating dynamic between Optimus Prime and Scorponok that’d continue to play out until for next two years until they become firm friends(!) and it came to a tragic end.
The checklist is a good one this week.
How strange that the previous issue of Thundercats’ was the one to bring a brand new look to the comic instead of waiting until the first monthly issue to do so. It now contained two strips, the first was all about one of the most annoying cartoon characters ever while the other was a reprint. I don’t think it lasted too long after this if my memory of these checklists serves me right. Dragon’s Claws #10 missed out on top billing again but the ‘Don’t Miss’ title this week is rather special for us because it’s actually been covered on the blog before.
Doctor Who Magazine #147 not only contained that very funny comic strip of the Seventh Doctor’s run-in with The Sleeze Brothers, it also contained a full guide to season 25 of the classic show which began with a certain story called Remembrance of the Daleks. This just so happened to be the very first Doctor Who story I ever watched, so it was a nice surprise to read about it when I’d bought the issue solely for the brothers’ section of the blog.
So, I said previously we’d make up for the lack of comics adverts these past few weeks…
We’ve no less than three this week, beginning with the big news that The Marvel Bumper Comic was going weekly with #14, the same issue number as The Real Ghostbusters’ first weekly the year before. This wasn’t the only thing the two comics had in common either if you look at the free gifts coming up. A new weekly schedule usually meant a degree of success so it’s a surprise to know the comic would end up cancelled before the end of the year.
That’s a hell of a packed line-up too, so we know each strip had to be very short but it still intrigues me. Another star of the Bumper Comic at a later stage would be William Tell, who we saw previously when his non-existent fortnightly comic was advertised across Marvel UK’s range. Here, those first strips were collected together into a graphic novel so at least they could get them out there. Not that anyone in the UK was aware of the show yet.
Finally for this week, a brand new humour comic was revealed!
Oh dear. Not only has the printing gone horribly wrong for the advert’s debut but there’s no indication of what It’s Wicked! would actually be. The inclusion of Slimer (whose popularity Marvel UK was rinsing as much as they could) told us it would be a funny comic, but the line of text at the bottom read like it was telling us something completely different. It’d essentially be a ghosts-and-monsters-themed take on Beano and The Dandy but it didn’t last long, just 17 issues in the end. With this advert as the pre-release hype I can see why kids didn’t exactly rush out to buy it.
If you thought that was a bad advert, wait until you see one (of two) to come next week. It changes one line of text from a year-old advert to publicise a supposedly new Spring Special, but it’s really just a carbon copy of a previous comic with a different issue number. Not the company’s finest hour. I’ll catch you back here in seven.
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