Predecessors After
World War II, the UK was intent on promoting homegrown publishers, and thus banned the direct importation of
American periodicals, including comic books; that ban was lifted in 1959. The British company
Thorpe & Porter became the sole UK distributor of both
DC and Marvel comics. Thus it was that in the early 1960s brand-new American-printed copies of
Fantastic Four #1,
Amazing Fantasy #15, and countless others appeared in the UK.
Alan Class Comics also reprinted select Marvel superhero stories during this period. Thorpe & Porter, however, went bankrupt in 1966 (although IPC released a
Marvel Annual, featuring Marvel superhero reprints, in autumn 1972).
Origins: MWOM and Spider-Man Comics Weekly In 1972, seeing a gap in the popular weekly comics market of the
UK,
Marvel Comics formed their own British publishing arm,
Marvel UK (under the corporate name of
Magazine Management London Ltd.). Though publishing comics in the UK for a British audience, Marvel UK was under the editorial direction of Marvel's New York offices, overseen by the then 21-year-old American writer/editor
Jenny Blake Isabella.
The Mighty World Of Marvel, in one form or another, was published continuously until 1984, while the Spider-Man weekly comic (under many different name changes) would continue until 1985.
Expansion: Skingley and Softly era In 1973, the US-based editor Isabella was replaced by the UK-based Petra Skingley (credited in the comics as "Peter L. Skingley" and "Peter Allan.") However, with the exception of some new covers drawn by Marvel Comics' American staff, no original material had yet been produced by Marvel UK. Tennant left in 1977 and was replaced by Nick Laing. In early 1978, Laing oversaw the launch of Marvel UK's
Star Wars Weekly title, soon after
the film was released in the UK. The weekly issues split the stories from the US monthly issues into smaller installments, and it usually took three weekly issues to complete a US monthly issue. In May 1980 the title became known as
The Empire Strikes Back Weekly, and in November 1980 it transformed into a monthly publication. Marvel UK's
Star Wars comic also published original
Star Wars stories by British creators as well as reprinting the US comics material. Many, but not all, of these original British stories were reprinted in the 1990s by
Dark Horse Comics. The format changed back to a weekly in June 1983 with the adaptation of
Return of the Jedi (which also became the new name of the publication), and remained so until its last issue in 1986. Prior to the
Return of the Jedi comic, the strips in the UK
Star Wars comics were printed in black and white, even those taken from the American color versions. The UK comics also reprinted several other supporting strips in each issue from other Marvel properties (such as
The Micronauts,
Tales of the Watcher,
Star-Lord, etc.). While the comic was in a weekly format, the supporting strips often made up the bulk of each issue.
Skinn era ("The Marvel Revolution") By the late 1970s, sales of Marvel UK titles had begun to fall and it was on a visit to the UK that
Stan Lee headhunted
Dez Skinn to revamp the ailing company. Knowing Skinn had significant experience in British comic publishing, Lee gave him the freedom to do what he felt best. Skinn had his own catchphrase in "Dez Sez," which was inspired by Lee's catchphrases from the 1960s. Skinn set out to change Marvel UK as he saw fit, dubbing the changes "The Marvel Revolution". Many of these creators had already worked with Skinn on his title
The House of Hammer a few years earlier, plus some new young talent. Skinn wrote: "[T]raditional British comics were at the time selling 150,000+ a week, firm sale, no returns. If Marvel and Spider-Man could look British enough for some of that to rub off, everybody would be happy ... But fixing the covers to resemble the non-glossy generic look of weekly anthology titles was one thing ... Having "splash" pages and then five or six frames a page just didn't stack up against
Warlord,
Action,
Battle, and the rest with their nine to 12 a page." So the US artwork was re-sized to fit several pages onto one and emulate the look of the more established UK boys' weeklies. Skinn reasoned that Marvel superhero weeklies had been effectively competing with each other in an already crowded market. So while the
Spider-Man Comic was to be the flagship superhero comic (with Thor, Iron Man, Avengers, Fantastic Four, and
Nova),
The Mighty World of Marvel was re-launched as
Marvel Comic, in the tradition of UK boys' adventure titles.
Dracula,
Conan the Barbarian, and
Skull the Slayer joined (or re-joined) established strips
Daredevil and Hulk (although the Hulk was replaced three issues after the re-launch by
Godzilla, as the Hulk left for his own title). Originally produced stories were included, such as Nick Fury drawn by Steve Dillon, and
Night Raven by
Steve Parkhouse and
David Lloyd. Also included was the
Black Knight, a Marvel character revamped to take in
Arthurian concepts, as well as feature the return of Captain Britain from comic book limbo. As well there was the usual US reprint material, such as
Ant-Man and in later issues the
Beast from
Amazing Adventures, and even The Defenders were moved in from
Rampage Monthly to increase the dose of Hulk action (a house ad showed a stern doctor holding out a handful of pills and saying, "Boredom is a sickness... and there's only one cure. More Hulk action!!!"). Arguably Skinn's most important decision was to launch
Doctor Who Weekly in 1979. Based on the
BBC TV series (which at that point had already been running for 16 years),
Doctor Who Weekly featured original comics stories by
John Wagner,
Pat Mills, and
Dave Gibbons, among many others, plus articles and features on the show itself. It proved a huge success, and by now Skinn had transformed Marvel UK back to being a major publisher of not just weekly comics but monthly titles such as
Starburst.
Starburst had been created by Skinn before he joined Marvel UK, but was purchased by Marvel when he joined the company. (eventually forming
Quality Communications in 1982).
Pocket Books In March 1980, as part of the "Marvel Revolution," Skinn launched the Marvel Pocket Books line with four 52-page titles. The line began with
Spider-Man, the
Fantastic Four,
Star Heroes (featuring TV tie-in
Battlestar Galactica and the toy-based strip the Micronauts continued from their previous run in
Star Wars Weekly), and
Chiller (starring
Dracula and the
Man-Thing with occasional appearance from other horror-related characters). Following Skinn's belief that much of Marvel's strongest material was that published in the 1960s and early 70s, many of these titles showcased strips from that period. Skinn drew on the design of the traditional UK Picture Library titles (such as
Thriller Picture Library and
War Picture Library), which boomed in the 1960s, to establish a definitive look for the Pocket Books. Skinn wrote that they "emulated the look in their
Combat Picture Library covers ... that was the look I wanted, to pull the line of pocket books together visually and make them different to any of our other titles ..." The first four titles were later joined by
Hulk,
The Titans (reprinting the 1960s stories of Captain America, Thor and Iron Man),
Marvel Classics Comics (featuring comic book
adaptations of classic literature),
Conan, and
Young Romance. Some titles were not a success in terms of sales:
Hulk,
Conan,
The Titans,
Marvel Classics Comics, and
Young Romance were cancelled after 13 issues, while
Star Heroes (which had replaced The Micronauts with the original
X-Men from issue #10) was re-launched as
X-Men Pocket Book from #14. All other Pocket Books were cancelled after issue 28 in July/August 1982. The Hulk strips continued in a newly launched
The Incredible Hulk Weekly and similarly the classic Fantastic Four strips resurfaced in a weekly title in October 1982. Both of these eventually folded into
Spider-Man, where the strips continued on and off until it changed into
The Spider-Man Comic, aimed at younger readers. The classic Spider-Man material continued in the first few issues of
The Daredevils.
1980s In September 1981, Captain Britain got his own strip in the pages of
Marvel Superheroes (the by-then firmly established monthly version of
The Mighty World Of Marvel/
Marvel Comic), as written by
Dave Thorpe and drawn by
Alan Davis. (Thorpe left in 1982, to be replaced by
Alan Moore in one of Moore's first major ongoing strips.) In October 1981, inspired by the success of its
Doctor Who title, Marvel UK began publishing a monthly ''
Blake's 7'' title, initially edited by Stewart Wales. However, as the television series itself went off the air in late 1981, the magazine itself lasted less than two years. Despite a flurry of new weeklies post-Skinn (
Forces in Combat,
Marvel Team-Up,
Future Tense and
Valour), by 1983 Marvel UK moved mainly to monthly titles such as
The Daredevils (featuring Moore and Davis's
Captain Britain). Many of Marvel UK's titles wouldn't last long, however, before being combined or cancelled outright due to poor sales. In January 1985, the first issue of
Captain Britain Monthly appeared with its titular strip written by
Jamie Delano and drawn by Alan Davis. This title lasted 14 issues before cancellation and would prove to be Marvel UK's last major new title for several years. New material was still being produced, such as the
Zoids stories (written by
Grant Morrison) for
Secret Wars and
Spider-Man and Zoids, but not on the scale or diversity previously seen. For the remainder of the 1980s the company published only a small handful of titles that appealed to superhero fans, but had considerable success on the UK newsstands with licensed titles such as
Care Bears,
Lady Lovely Locks,
The Real Ghostbusters,
ThunderCats,
Transformers, and many others. These all featured original strips as well as some US reprints.
Transformers, in particular, was a major seller for Marvel UK, selling 200,000 copies a week at its height. Its main writer,
Simon Furman, would eventually take over the Marvel US version of the title as well, and continues to work on the franchise to this day, though it is no longer published by either branch of Marvel Comics. The Marvel UK
Transformers series, running 332 issues, is, besides
Bob Budiansky's run on the American comic, regarded as the most important collection of Transformers fiction. As such,
Transformers remains one of Marvel UK's most important historical titles. (The Marvel UK
Transformers series was reprinted by
Titan Books in the 2000s with some omissions, notably all of the UK exclusive stories prior to issue 45. Although these have now been reprinted by
IDW Publishing along with the rest of the weekly and Annual stories as part of
The Transformers Classics UK collections.) From 1988, it was
The Real Ghostbusters that became the top seller; it ran for 193 issues, four annuals, and a
Slimer spinoff, and its characters were used to anchor several other titles like
Wicked! and
The Marvel Bumper Comic. In 1988, Marvel UK letterer/designer
Richard Starkings pushed for the company to publish its own
US-format comics, beginning with ''
Dragon's Claws and Death's Head'' (a spin-off character from Marvel UK's
Transformers title).
The Sleeze Brothers (1989–1990) was a creator-owned title by John Carnell and
Andy Lanning. It was
Steve White who launched the first critically acclaimed volume of
Knights of Pendragon (1990–1991), written by
Dan Abnett and
John Tomlinson with art by
Gary Erskine, which mixed superheroes and
Arthurian myth. It also featured Captain Britain among many other Marvel Comics heroes, such as Iron Man.
Strip was a short-lived comics
anthology published by Marvel UK in 1990. It ran for 20 issues (February - November 1990) and featured work by many British comics creators, including
Alan Grant,
Ian Gibson,
Pat Mills,
Kevin O'Neill,
Si Spencer and
John Wagner. Strips include
Marshal Law by Pat Mills and Kev O'Neill and
Grimtoad by Grant, Wagner and Gibson. By 1990, Marvel had told its UK branch that long miniseries were too expensive and that it should produce four-issue minis (
John Freeman recalled "some legal or distribution restriction in the US on publishing three-part miniseries, which the company would have preferred") that would try out new characters. Freeman and Dan Abnett first wanted to revive
Death's Head, give a miniseries to
Strip character
Rourke of the Radlands, and spin-off
Doctor Who Magazine's
Abslom Daak as an original character. This last one was dropped as Marvel felt
Doctor Who was "a 'dead' franchise and there was no value to Marvel in seeking to extend a brand they did not themselves own."
Neary era Paul Neary became Marvel UK editor-in-chief circa 1990, appointed to revamp the company and make another attempt at the US market. As a stop-gap, he had two short-lived reprint titles created:
Havoc and
Meltdown (which reprinted
Akira). The US-format titles began with ''
Death's Head II'', a recreation of
Simon Furman's cyborg bounty hunter. The titles were set in the existing Marvel Universe but with more of a focus on
cyberpunky
science fiction and magic than the traditional superhero fare. Titles such as
Warheads (
wormhole-hopping mercenaries),
Motormouth (later
Motormouth and Killpower, a streetwise girl and escaped genetically modified super-assassin hop around the universe having adventures) and a second volume of
Knights of Pendragon. These were all linked by plots featuring the organization
Mys-Tech, a shadowy group of
Faustians bent on world domination. Some of these titles were also reprinted in the UK anthology
Overkill. At some point during Neary's run but before the market crash, Marvel UK was running low on money. They requested an emergency meeting with
Marvel Entertainment executives Bill Bevin and Terry Stewart to approve a £1m last-ditch strategy. While they got the money, writer
Sean Howe would later be told that Bevin was livid about being called to London for a mere one million, asking "why are you wasting my time?" Neary instituted a deliberate policy to feature Marvel US guest-stars in the Marvel UK stories. However, they would only be featured on eleven pages, and these pages were designed to be able to cut from the main story; the eleven pages without the guest-star were run in
Overkill. This policy was dropped after market research showed people expected to see superheroes in Marvel ("that included watching a group of teenagers rip
Overkill apart from behind a two-way mirror", according to Freeman). Where US Marvel characters were featured, all the storylines were approved by the American editor in charge of that book. Some were more responsive than others to the outlines, with editors such as
Bobbie Chase offering useful feedback for Marvel UK's editors. Very few Marvel US comics referenced any of the original characters or major events that occurred within the Marvel UK comics, with an exception being
The Incredible Hulk in August 1993. Nevertheless, in the US, these comics were initially immensely successful, with some issues being reprinted to keep up with demand. Marvel UK massively expanded, and
trading cards were made of their characters. During this flush period,
Tom DeFalco requested they make a new hero called
Red Squirrel Man. An entire sub-imprint called
Frontier Comics was created in 1993, patterning itself after DC's
Vertigo Comics and Marvel UK even showed up at the
Lord Mayor's Show in 1993, with staff members dressed as superheroes and Death's Head II. Despite a lineup that included
Liam Sharp,
Simon Coleby,
Bryan Hitch,
Carlos Pacheco, Graham Marks,
Salvador Larroca,
Dan Abnett, and many others, too many titles were launched too quickly in a market which was already swamped by the early 1990s comics boom. In late 1993, Marvel UK would be devastated by the comics market glut and subsequent crash; on September 29, their new Director of Sales, Lou Bank, reported that they were being hurt by "inadequate display of product" at retail "[that] has hindered sale through" and that it was failed there was "simply no room to display" all the comics being made.
Dark Guard,
Cyberspace 3000,
Wild Thing,
Black Axe,
Super Soldiers, Paul Neary told
Comic World that this was a "trimming of fat" to allow Marvel UK to focus its marketing efforts on "our strongest characters" and claimed the canceled projects would see the light of day in 1994. as part of a marketing strategy to portray the new Marvel UK as a lean, hungry company that could hold its own against the larger (and implicitly duller) competition. In 1994, Marvel UK had ceased publishing in the US market and was now only printing a handful of titles — mostly reprints — for the UK market, as well as licensed titles like the long-running
Doctor Who Magazine. ''Death's Head II
was canceled at #16, of which distributor Capital only sold 7,400 copies. Various creators began looking elsewhere for work and Lou Banks left for Dark Horse Comics. Neary planned a four-title relaunch of their US format line, including Nocturne
(an updated Night Raven), The Golden Grenadier
, Doctor Who Magazine'' continued to carry the Marvel UK logo and indicia up to the December 1999 issue (#285), after which it was changed to only Panini UK. ==Publications==