Epic Tales and Blatant Commercialism
Words by Ciaran Conliffe
Nowadays the Marvel Cinematic Universe is an unstoppable international media presence, but that wasn’t always the case. Our world used to be a lot less joined up, and for a child in rural Donegal in the mid-80s “Marvel Comics” meant weekly pulps in a mixture of black and white with colour, sold at the newsagents and driven far more by the demands of Hasbro Marketing than anything else.
Marvel UK’s origin lay in the actions of the post-World War 2 Labour government, who tried to boost the UK publishing industry by banning the importation of American magazines. This wasn’t censorship: it was fine to reprint “British versions”, if they were produced by local industry. This led to the parallel evolution of the UK comics industry with titles like “Eagle” and “Valiant”, and to the development of a homegrown style of comic that had two noticeable differences from the US version. First, they were usually published weekly, rather than monthly. And secondly, they were larger, both in terms of height and width and in terms of the number of pages. This meant that even when the law was repealed in 1959 the expectations of the British (and Irish) comic reader was very different from the American one.
Marvel initially licensed their reprints out to other publishers, but in 1972 they decided to set up their own publishing arm in the UK to print both original works and localised American comics. Initially it was overseen by editorial assistant (and future writer/artist) Tony Isabella, but an expansion the following year meant that Petra Skingley was hired to oversee it “on the ground”. Given the tenor of the times and the perceived audience for the comic she was credited as “Peter Skingley”, something that a later female editor in chief named Maureen Softly copied (as “Matt Softly”). Another notable editor in the 1970s was Neil Tennant, who would go on to become half of The Pet Shop Boys.
It was in the mid-1980s that I, as a child, began reading comics. Four titles from Marvel UK, all (from a business standpoint) basically glorified toy advertisements, fundamentally shaped my view of the medium. They weren’t the only comics I read (my elder brother was a massive 2000AD fan and I devoured his collection of them) but they were mostly the comics that I owned. Let me take you through them.
Secret Wars/Secret Wars II
Marvel’s first ever all-line crossover happened in 1984, and in the true spirit of the 80s it was pure commercialism at the heart of it. Mattel had gained the license to make toys based on Marvel heroes, and thought that a series bringing all the heroes together would be a great concept to pin a toy line around. The toys did make it to Donegal, but despite the brand recognition they struggled to compete against the stars of the action figure boom like “He-Man” and “Star Wars”. The comics did extremely well, though. It’s not surprising that Marvel UK picked them up for reprint the following year. The original 12-issue monthly US run turned into 31 weekly issues padded out with backup strips. These starred Canadian superhero team Alpha Flight, X-Men member Iceman (popular at the time as a star of cartoon “Spiderman and Friends”) and a toy tie-in comic called “Zoids” (more on that later.)
The premise of “Secret Wars” was extremely simplistic, as you’d expect. A godlike being called The Beyonder decides to kidnap all of Earth’s heroes and villains, then pit them against each other on a constructed planet (called “Battleworld”) to see who would win. The writers took advantage of this premise and the interactions between groups of heroes to cover a lot of ground, though. One of my favourites is them bringing the unconscious structural prejudice of the heroes (and villains) against mutants to the fore, leading to the mutants establishing their own third faction. (The fact that the Beyonder had put Magneto on “team hero” didn’t help.) The whole thing was such a success that annual crossovers of some sort became an annual Marvel tradition.
Of course, the big draw for a kid like me was getting to see all these heroes together in one spot. Cartoons and TV shows meant that everyone knew who Spider-Man and the Hulk were, but many of the others were totally new to me. This meant that for many kids (including me) the first leader of the Avengers they knew was a black woman – Monica Rambeau, recently introduced to the MCU in “Wandavision”. After the original series ended the comic continued with a sequel about the adventures of The Beyonder on Earth, becoming slightly incoherent as it pulled in issues from other series that he appeared in. This comic is remembered for one moment that has become a meme: the issue where Spider-Man has to teach an extradimensional god-being how to go to the bathroom.
Spider-Man and Zoids
Spider-Man was by far the most popular Marvel character at this time, with two recent cartoon series in endless reruns and a live action show from the 1970s still getting airtime. A comic with his name on it was sure to sell, and so tying it onto a comic advertising a toy line was just good business sense. (The Zoids had actually been introduced in a backup strip for “Secret Wars”, but the storyline properly began here.) It worked, too – despite being a relatively niche concept from Japan (giant dinosaur-shaped mecha) the toys were massively popular in the UK.
The storyline for the European release of Zoids was completely different from that in Japan and America. Ditching the complicated imperial politics behind the original release, the European version divided them into Blue and Red factions of ancient war machines from a lost civilisation continuing to fight a pointless war. The Marvel comics were a key part of the marketing (with mini-comics packed into larger toy boxes). The comics were written by legendary comics creator Grant Morrison (in their first ever job in the industry) and they blended elements from “Alien”, “Terminator”, kaiju movies like “Godzilla” and even Norse myths of Ragnorak to create something strange and weird and compelling to children like me. The battles among my toys often had grand sweeping backstories, and Morrison was a direct inspiration for many of them.
Compared to Zoids, the Spider-Man stories were considered tame. One of the most notable storylines in the period was Spider-Man dealing with a black suit of “smart” material that he’d picked up during Secret Wars. The suit turned out to be alive and tried to take over his life before he defeated it. Many years later it would return as Venom, a convoluted backstory for someone now regarded as a classic comics villain. In typical Marvel UK fashion these stories were actually stitched together and condensed from multiple issues of the US comic, since it was running well behind. Backup strips included other toy tie-ins (like “Sectaurs”) and a deeply grim series called “Strikeforce Morituuri” about heroes who took on superpowers that would eventually kill them in order to fight an alien invasion. The most notable backup strip it had was reprinting Marvel’s official Star Wars comics, which even took over the cover several times.
“Spider-Man and Zoids” ran for one week less than a year before being cancelled due to declining sales of Zoids toys. This was right in the middle of Morrison’s epic conclusion to their saga, so readers like myself were left hanging. Despite this short run the comic looms large in my memory, enough that I thought it had run for years rather than months – perhaps a sign of how differently we perceive time when we’re young.
Action Force
One of the most popular action figure series in the USA from the 1960s was “GI Joe”. The original version of this was a 30 centimetre tall poseable toy that came in cloth uniforms and was marketed in Europe as “Action Man”. The success of Kenner’s Star Wars line of 9.5 centimetre tall figures prompted a GI Joe spinoff at that scale, marketed as the “Real American Hero” line. Naturally this wouldn’t market as well in Europe, so they were rebranded and renamed with (of course) a Marvel UK comic tie-in. This was the genesis of “Action Force”.
The weekly comic was a mixture of US reprints (tweaked slightly) and a small number of original stories. Some new characters were introduced (an ex-British special forces soldier named Flint, for example) while others were altered to be less US-centric. A few of these changes made it back into the comic, which was generally more popular in the UK than in the US. In part this was because the GI Joe cartoon was the definitive version there, while in the UK the comic stood alone.
One thing that really sticks out about the comic was the lead writer, Larry Hama, having a huge affection for the concept of “ninjas”. Two of the more distinctive toys in the range were Snake Eyes (a good-guy ninja dressed in black) and Storm Shadow (a bad-guy ninja dressed in white). In Hama’s story these two became central to one of the comic’s longest running plotlines, a murder mystery that took several surprising twists.
Other twists included the backstory for Cobra Commander, the masked leader of Action Force’s enemies. It was revealed that he was originally an auto mechanic who took a grudge against the government, and somehow managed to wind up founding and leading a massive terrorist organisation (that might have had links to an ancient secret society). Even more shocking was when Cobra Commander was secretly murdered and replaced, with only a few of his underlings knowing the man behind the mask had changed. This was heady stuff for an eight year old to take in.
Action Force only lasted for a year as a standalone comic, with its most notable backup strip being the adventures of Marvel’s martial artist Shang-Chi. (He fit so well into the Action Force universe that his strip crossed over with the main one, making “Action Force'' into another branch of the Marvel multiverse.) The toy line was still doing well enough that they wanted to keep it going in some form, though, and so “Action Force” itself became a backup strip for Marvel UK’s most successful comic: “Transformers”.
Transformers
The Transformers franchise had its origins in Japan, or more properly in the American toy company Hasbro buying the rights to several Japanese toy lines including “Diaclone” and “Macross”. Hasbro collaborated with Marvel, more specifically with Marvel writer Bob Budiansky, to create names and storylines that these toys could be slotted into. At the time Marvel was in the cartoon business as well as the comics business (the Spider-Man cartoon was their first big success) so the comic was almost an afterthought. But as with Action Force, the comic was a far bigger success than the cartoon across the Atlantic.
The comic launched with a four-part miniseries, introducing the two Transformer factions (Autobot and Decepticon), establishing where they came from and why they transform into Earth vehicles, and ending on a cliffhanger with both sides being disabled by a mysterious purple Decepticon named Shockwave. In the Marvel UK version, these four issues played out over a year of fortnightly issues, interspersed with many UK-specific stories. The cliffhanger coincided with a shift to a weekly format. Of course, like most UK comics they were supplemented by hardback “Christmas annuals”, which became a regular December 25th treat for me.
Over the following years “Transformers” quickly became Marvel UK’s best-selling comic by a wide margin, outstripping even the toy line on which it was based in popularity. Comics in the UK had tended more towards adventure and science fiction stories (as seen in the massively popular 2000AD), so Transformers was a natural fit. The backup strips followed the same theme, including Marvel characters like Machine Man (an android investigating his creator’s murder) and a Hercules story that saw him going on an interplanetary journey. Both characters are relatively obscure in Marvel history (neither has appeared in the MCU yet) but their presence in Transformers made them seem like fundamental parts of Marvel to me as a child.
Transformers: The Movie, released in 1986, was one of the first movies that I saw in the cinema. What made it even more exciting was how it tied into my favourite comic book, which had a UK-exclusive storyline called “Target: 2006” involving time travel and bringing the new characters of the movie into the continuity of the comics. This also reflected the reality of the comic which had to deal with introducing new toys, new characters and even entirely new concepts (like the “Pretenders”, transforming robots inside an external apparently organic shell) into the Transformers universe.
The popularity of the Marvel UK version of the comic led to its editor, Simon Furman, taking over creative control of the US comic as well when Bob Budiansky decided to step back from it. He steered the comics through to their end in 1992, after seven years and 332 issues. Unlike “Zoids”, he had enough notice to push it all to an epic conclusion. (The US finale comic had the rather cheeky tagline “#80 in a 4-issue limited series”.)
The end of “Transformers” marked the beginning of the end for Marvel UK. Aggressive expansion by two major comics distributors (Diamond and Capital City) combined with a business model that hid the risk in the market from the publishers meant that more and more comics were produced, and it was only when comic shops began failing that they realised they had oversaturated the market. Marvel UK was massively scaled back and no longer existed as an independent entity by 1994. This costcutting wasn’t enough to save Marvel itself, which filed for bankruptcy in 1996 (and was then bought by Toy Biz, but that’s another story).
Marvel comics in the UK now meant distributions of American titles, rather than locally produced comics. It was a sad end to a company that meant so much to so many children like me. They may have been nakedly commercial enterprises designed more to sell toys than tell stories, but the honest creativity that creators like Furman and Morrison put into them lifted them above their crass origins. They showed me that stories could be epic and meaningful, and opened me up to a wider world of literature. And for that, I’ll always be grateful to Marvel UK.
Ciaran believes that those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, while those who do are doomed to watch everyone else repeat them while they desperately try to share historical parallels. Being in the latter camp, he's written extensively about history over the last few years along with movies, pop culture, social observations, and possibly a shiny bit of tinfoil that grabs his attention. He's also gone on stage at the Workman's Club in Dublin and the Cairde Festival in Sligo, which gave him the courage to speak at multiple international information security conferences as part of his day job. His name literally translates to "little black rabbit hunter", which has probably had more influence on his life than he'd like to admit.
