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| Copyright MARVEL COMICS |
I was looking through some '70s back issues of The Mighty World Of Marvel earlier tonight and was appalled by the amateurish manner in which many of them were presented. No wonder the title (along with several other Marvel UK weeklies) was hemorrhaging readers in its middle years. MWOM had started as a mixture of spot colour, full colour, and tones, then withered into a muddy, murky, black and grey mess that ruined the artwork and was sore on the eyes.
As an example, look at the page below. The top two panels have been trimmed (shortened) to make the page better accommodate the slightly different dimensions of the UK Marvel titles, but the bottom border lines haven't been restored - leaving the panels looking as if they just disappear into the 'gutter'. That's taking laziness just a bit too far, wouldn't you say? And it's not an isolated incident; there are several examples of such clumsiness in this one issue alone.
Then there's a Daredevil splash page (below) which has been clumsily 'drawn-up', but is missing parts of the credit box and other bits of detail, giving it an unfinished appearance. Doesn't it look awful? Marvel UK did eventually get its act together and improve a bit, but these pages fare badly when compared against the professional quality of comics by IPC and DCT, with which they shared space on the newsagents' shelves at the same time. Marvel later stopped trimming the artwork and learned to master more subtle shades of tone before doing away with it altogether, but until then, too many issues suffered from inferior production values.
I have very fond memories of those early Marvel UK mags, but when I look back at the makeshift appearance of many of them, I wonder why I wasn't put off by just how shoddily-produced they were. This is Marvel we're talking about - surely they were capable of doing far better than this and giving the readers a higher standard for their money? Remember, they weren't any less expensive than rival periodicals by other publishers, which contained mostly new material, whereas the Marvel weeklies were mainly reprint. (Perhaps Marvel 'weaklies' would've been a more apt description.)
I have to be completely honest and say that I'm surprised that Marvel got away with producing such inferior-looking comics and wonder how they managed to survive for so long. I suppose it's a testament to the artwork of Kirby, Ditko, Heck, Trimpe, Buscema, Colan, etc., that even when it was butchered in such an appalling manner it wouldn't just lie down and die, and that its inherent quality still managed to shine through - barely perhaps, but just enough to show what it was made of. And no doubt the skillful scripting of Lee, Lieber, Thomas, etc., helped 'carry' the poor visual reproduction at its worst.
Even the cover blurbs were sometimes inaccurate. For example, in #81 there are no 'inside news scoops on Marvel', only some info about a competition (hardly a scoop), and Spidey's swap shop is nowhere in evidence. (And wouldn't that belong in SMCW anyway?) I still have a soft spot for these comics, but my appreciation of them is hardly a 'warts and all' acceptance of them. Sometimes I have to half-close my eyes and squint a bit in order to blur their faults and look past their inadequacies. They didn't always do the art and stories justice, far too often depending on the readers' mercy, but they were of their time - and as that time coincided with my youth, I therefore can't help but think fondly of them - despite their imperfections.
Something that used to mildly annoy me when I read Marvel UK titles in the 80s (Transformers, Spider-Man and Zoids, and Action Force) was the clumsy and obvious way that the spelling of some words had been corrected for the UK market.
ReplyDeleteFor example, if the word 'color' was used, the letter 'r' would be changed to 'ur' to match British spelling. But the correction was often done really crudely and always stuck out to me as looking almost like the page had been vandalised.
I understand that it couldn't have been ready to squeeze two letters in to the space for one, but even so, some of these corrections were really obvious and looked a bit amateurish.
For all that though, I still adore that era of Marvel UK - it's where I first encountered so many characters and creators I came to know so well later on.
Yeah, the lettering corrections were just as you say - clumsily done. In some cases they may not have been altering full size duplicate stats of the pages, but print-sized 'acetate' proofs (or 'negatives') - making it immensely difficult to make changes neatly. I'm not sure exactly what they were working with, but you'd think they could have found a way to make the alterations less noticeable.
ReplyDeleteI always thought the tidiest way would have been to re-letter the whole balloon. Then again, there may have been time pressures that made this impractical.
ReplyDeleteOne of the most ill-fitting examples of this was in Action Force, which reprinted GI Joe. Wherever a character referred to the team, the words 'GI Joe' were changed to 'A.F', which not only looked odd, but sounds extremely strange if you imagine a character saying it out loud!
Some corrections were made in the States, others in Britain, DS. (Back in the '70s.) Dave Gibbons re-lettered entire captions and word balloons in some early issues of MWOM.
ReplyDeleteHi Kid,
ReplyDeleteWhen re-reading these reprint comics from the 70's, I'm amazed that I didn't spot these original "failings", but I started at 11 years old and was instantly blown away by the characters and storylines, which appeared to be superior to our homegrown comics and aimed at older kids and the young teenager.
I also keep coming across printed letters sent from a younger Mr G. Robson from EK - you were quite a regular correspondent and expressed both positive & negative opinions - just like today!
Cheers,
Duncan
I'm not sure I could fairly claim to have been a regular correspondent, as I can only remember about 3, possibly 4 letters back then (plus a 'wants' ad in the Swap Shop), but I enjoy seeing them again as I feel it incorporates me into that particular time as an active participant rather than just a mere observer. Positive and negative, eh? It's a wonder I didn't cancel myself out. (Or would that take either two positives or two negatives to do that? Science was never my strong point.)
ReplyDeleteAs a precocious teen purist, what irked me the most (along with the Letratone/Zipatone overkill) was the way they tried presenting old material as being set in the present day. Like in the Fantastic Four strip, they decided that the Red Ghost was some kind of obsolete relic of the Cold War, and changed him to the Mad Ghost.
ReplyDeleteEven clunkier was when the Hulk strip finally reached the reprint of #140 with the Harlan Ellison-based story introducing Jarella. Of course, that story had started in the contemporary Avengers title, but the Avengers hadn't caught up reprint-wise, so they went through all sorts of strangling contrivances to try and work their way around it.
At the time, I'd have preferred it it they'd just come clean and said "Hey, these are old stories, but bear with us, they will be modern-day dramas soon enough" - which they probably couldn't do because by time they caught up they'd have run out of original material to print......AAAARGH, it was all too much for my must-be-consistent mindset of the day.
On the other hand, I was pleased they existed at all, as it was a cheap way to catch up on the old stories that I wasn't likely to see anywhere else.
The quality of the UK Marvels at times were atrocious but like others I tended not to take too much notice of these as I enjoyed the strips so much. There were exceptions of course like the grey tones you mentioned. Sometimes these were so overpowering that it was difficult to see the detail in some of the panels. I also recall seeing a few cases where someone had hand drawn (very poorly) additional background characters or added to the torso, face etc of a character etc after resizing the panel. And of course there were the legendary (is that the word?) bloody awful internal splash pages that were commissioned when strips were split up so you would have a lovely Neal Adams drawn Avengers strip with a truly awful / childish looking in-house splash page summarising the previous weeks story. And of course there were a lot of really badly drawn and designed covers. But despite the flaws I loved the first 3 years on these comics. I do remember a few regular letter writers like Ivor Davies, Jim Ivers, Rob Summers etc and I think I have a comic somewhere with one of your letter in it as well Kid.
ReplyDeleteWhy they never simply said that some stories happened before or after others is a mystery, BS. They would also redraw cameos of heroes who hadn't yet been introduced in their own strips, instead of saying something like "You haven't yet been properly introduced to Thor (or whoever) in his own tales, but it won't be too long before we give you the full lowdown on him so keep watching future issues.' I wouldn't have minded the redrawn figures of heroes if whoever did them could've matched the styles of Kirby or Ditko, but the altered characters stood out like a sore thumb.
ReplyDeleteI'd say the first 30 issues or so of MWOM were the best before it went off the boil for a while, and maybe the same or just before with SMCW.
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A letter from a future letterer, McS. Maybe it was fate? I suppose when compared to the awful panel extensions to the resized Marvel strips in Wham!, Smash!, and Pow!, the Marvel UK titles probably seemed far superior, but compared against other current comics by different publishers, they were pretty poor. Yeah, the new splash pages were usually terrible, but occasionally (and probably by accident) some weren't as bad as they could've been. Still, wouldn't change those times for the world, eh?
The name Ivor Davies rings a bell- was he involved in seeing up comic marts in Glasgow?
ReplyDeleteI have a feeling that Marvel UK once reprinted a strip where a character mentioned David Letterman, and they changed the dialogue to a British celebrity instead. I never cared for that kind of thing, part of the appeal of American comics to me were that they were glimpses of another culture- the world seemed a lot bigger in those days!
Of course there was once a British Spider-Man story that took place in the TVAM studios- I wonder how that would have been altered if one of the American titles decided to reprint it in the US!
I doubt that the British Spidey story would've been altered at all, DS, because him being in the UK was part of the story. Rather than change it (if they wanted to), it would've been easier for Marvel US just not to reprint it.
ReplyDeleteAs for changing references of American stars to British ones, yeah, that kind of irked me as well.
Hi Dave, yes Ivor Davis set up marts and owns/runs Red Hot Comics in Glasgow. I seem to recall the UK PM being drawn into a US reprint replacing him with the then US President .
ReplyDeleteAs for Ivor Davies, his name rings a bell. Was it him who set up the big Memorabilia marts perhaps?
ReplyDeleteYour comment must've been awaiting moderation when I published mine, McS, 'cos it popped up above mine when I 'approved' it.
ReplyDeleteI know that Nixon and Agnew were redrawn (quite well too, for a change) as Ford and Kissinger in a Hulk tale, though they forgot to change one panel, but that must've been a different occasion than the one you refer to, which I don't recall.
48 years ago!!! dear Lord that's a lifetime ago. I still remember the day I first saw MWOM issue 1 on sale in R S McColl's in Rutherglen during school lunch break as if it was yesterday. I still have my first 25 issues of MWOM stored away in my loft I will need to visit them again for a trip down memory lane.
ReplyDeleteYeah, scarey, isn't it, McS. I remember seeing #1 on an newsagent's exterior wall rack on the way into the Barras on the day it come out, but it took me an hour or so to convince my mother to give me 5p to buy it. I bought another copy a day short of a week later in Hamilton when I was in with my father. Memories, memories.
ReplyDeleteHi McScotty, thanks for the info! I used to enjoy the big marts at the City Halls, so I'm grateful to Mr Davies for helping organise them.
ReplyDeleteI shuddered when you mentioned Nixon, Kid. Not due to any political opinions, just remembering a little girl in a Neal Adams Green Lantern story who was drawn to look like a 4-year old female version of Richard Nixon! It was quite unsettling!
Does anyone remember MWOM#1 being advertised on TV? That's when my 'love' affair with Marvel began.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise thanks for posting the fabulous FF/ Hulk/ Spidey poster. One of the best things ever done by Buscema super-hero wise. I don't recall ever seeing it in any US comic, so my assumption is it was done for the UK.
Sometimes the UK weeklies could be really strange, cheap material sometimes (seldomly) mixed with original work by Kane, Adams and Buscema. How Big John ended up on Captain Britain I don't know!
Spirit of '64
Who was it organised the big memorabilia fairs? Was that Ivor Davies? I seem to remember that whoever it was, he had an 'old-fashioned' name.
ReplyDeleteI always thought that Gabby from the Newsboy Legion looked like Nixon, DS. Apparently, Jack Kirby was aware of this and made subtle changes to lessen the likeness when the group was revived in the '70s.
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The poster was later made available in America to subscribers, S64. The ad appeared in various Marvel comics as well as F.O.O.M. #5. I saw the TV ad for MWOM #1 after buying the comic, either that night or on the Sunday, but not before. Can't remember if I saw one for SMCW #1. Maybe. Would have to see it again to know whether it rang any bells.
I don't know if Ivor set up the big memorabilia events (I don't think he did) but he did set up a few smaller ones and was a regular attender at them back in the day. I remember someone telling me that MWOM was advertised on TV but I have never seen it (would love to though).
ReplyDeleteStan Lee did the voiceover for the ad, McS, so I'd love to see (and hear) it again. I know the name of the guy who started the memorabilia fairs, but my brain's in a fog at the moment. I seem to think it was either Ivor or Oscar, or a name like that, but just can't drag it out from the recesses of my mind. Annoyingly, I think I once mentioned it on the blog a few years back. Maybe his surname was Cook - that's suddenly popped into my cranium.
ReplyDeleteHi Kid, I think i Mentioned comic ads in a reply a while ago, just wondering if anyone has any, i don't remember the MWOM one, but i remember the one for Countdown really well..I'd love to see a DVD with them all On, there's a 2000 AD one on you tube, but I'm sure there were ones for 60's & 70's Dandy & Beano too, Victor Lewis Smith showed a bit of one on his show a few years back, an advert for the Dandy Thunderbang!.
ReplyDeleteI also bought the First 30 or so MWOM, that pretty much got me into buying the US editions of various Marvels, which were Loads better, in colour for a start, Glossy covers ECT..and not as you point out, badly Laid out & edited, i did love them though, for a While.
I've seen the 2000 A.D. one on YouTube, RD, but I'd love a dvd of all the ads for comics in the '60s & '70s. Shows you how much money could potentially be made from comics back then if publishers were prepared to pay for TV ads. And some people say there's still a comics 'industry' in this country, eh? Not any more - certainly not of the size and scale we had back then.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, there's loads of other TV ads I'd love to have on a disc, not just ones for comics.
I Tend to make my own, by just downloading them from You tube, and burning them on to DVD..I've got loads of them, and continuity ones, with channel idents ECT..just for my own personal use of course! but i have seen people flogging them on E bay before now.
ReplyDeleteThe quality of some of them on YouTube isn't great, RD, which is why I'd like to see a professionally produced dvd, with as high a quality as possible. Might happen yet.
ReplyDeleteControversially I really rate MWOM 81. It was the second one I picked up after No.77. The paper stock was good, the FF were on the cover and the stories were great. From then on it was on order from my local newsagents.
ReplyDeleteAh, that'll be nostalgic affection talking, CN, which is fair enough, I suppose. After all, it's what this site is all about.
ReplyDelete