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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