50 YEARS FABULOUS FLASHBACK - PLANET Of The APES & DRACULA LIVES...

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'Twas back on Saturday October 19th 1974 that two new Marvel UK weeklies hit newsagents' shelves, likely resulting in kids across the country asking their parents for an increase in their pocket-money.  The 'first' of these titles - Planet Of The Apes - lasted for 123 issues, having subsumed Dracula Lives - its sister periodical - at #88, which means DL obviously only managed to last until #87.

POTA also included at some stage various Marvel characters, such as Warlock, Captain Marvel, Ka-Zar and the like, with US Killraven strips being redrawn and relettered as Apeslayer strips, such was the shortage of actual Apes material.  In fact, new Apes strips were specially drawn for the weekly title then later reprinted in the US mag, probably the first and perhaps only time such a thing has happened.

Dracula Lives reprinted the main strip from the US title, as well as Werewolf By Night and the Frankenstein Monster, as well as (later down the line) Ghost Rider and Man-Thing.  Both of these British weeklies could've done with better printing, especially Dracula Lives, but hey, we were young and things like that didn't seem to bother us too much at the time.

So, 50 years later, let's think back to our youth and celebrate a time when Marvel UK was on the march, before its output started to dwindle in later years.