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

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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 (in b&w with grey tones) the main strip from the US colour title Tomb Of Dracula, along with 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 and decline in later years.

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When composing this post earlier, I merely took the covers and posters from folders of earlier scans, but I decided to go that extra mile and dig out my copies of the mags so that I could show you some of the contents, the better to prompt your memories.  Remember them? 

And in case you were wondering, below is how the above poster looked in its original form - as the cover for the US version of Dracula Lives #5.  (Wish they'd left the burd in the UK version.)