1993: COMICS SCENE ARTICLE ON MARVEL UK'S SUPER SOLDIERS

From May 1993: COMICS SCENE issue 33 previews MARVEL UK's SUPER SOLDIERS, one of the burgeoning number of UKverse books to hit in the booming months of early '93.

The book eventually ran for eight issues before being cancelled suddenly in the Genesis Massacre (the sudden decision, in the face of plummeting sales across the industry, to withdraw the British Bullpen from the US market).

The first issue, enhanced with a silver foil cover, shifted more than 200,000 copies. Issues can still be found in retailer dump bins to this day.

Issues 9 &10 were announced in the pages of MARVEL AGE MAGAZINE but never appeared. The eighth issue was the only part of the REDMIST 2020 crossover/ launch that actually made it into print. The other three books (DEATHDUTY, BLOOD RUSH and ROID RAGE) were all scrapped at the last possible moment.

1994: THE CLANDESTINE PROMO TRADING CARD (Marvel UK)

From February 1994: the free MARVEL UK CLANDESTINE Trading Card, cover-mounted with COMIC WORLD magazine issue 24.

This, unfortunately, really was the last gasp of the British Bullpen'smarketing mahine. Even as this freebie adorned issue of COMIC WORLD magazine was hitting British newsagents (it had pretty good distribution through WH Smith stores and selected independent newsagents, including inexplicably my own local shop which probably didn't carry more than 100 titles overall) and specialist stores (where it served as a nice compliment to the more news-based COMICS INTERNATIONAL from the House of Skinn), word of the Genesis Massacre was spreading through the industry.

The British Bullpen had put a lot of promotional weight behind this and LOOSE CANNONS in the hope that they would address the perception issue that the whole UKverse line was suffering from quantity over quality. Twelve months earlier it had been perfectly acceptable to flood the market with (sometimes) substandard fodder but, now the speculators had bailed, readers and retailers were being more choosy with their pounds and dollars. And, frankly, the amount of British books still surfacing in the 50p boxes twenty years on suggests a lot of retailers had been overordering on an epic (not Epic) scale. 

The speed of the collapse was so fast that dozens of books and projects were caught in the final maelstrom. And very few emerged unscathed. 

THE CLANDESTINE was one of the lucky ones. Having Alan Davies' name above the door certainly helped but being a Marvel UK book didn't. So it shifted to the US operation. LOOSE CANNONS also looked like an obvious winner but didn't make the cut. 

If it comes as any consolation to the Annex of Ideas, TOPPS COMICS, publishers of THE MARK OF ZORRO, also didn't last... Despite bankable franchises like THE X-FILES, MARS ATTACKS, STAR WARS GALAXY MAGAZINE, JURASSIC PARK and XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS.

Those were indeed hard times. 

1994: CLAN DESTINE in MARVEL COMICS PRESENTS

From July 1994: The fallout from the GENESIS MASSACRE: CLAN DESTINE's debut in the pages of the anthology MARVEL COMICS PRESENTS.  

The Alan Davis creation was to have been part of the MARVEL UK renaissance a retrenching of the operation with a new emphasis on quality over quantity in the hopes of riding out the industry slump.

However, Marvel NY took radical action to deal with the product glut and ordered the London office to cease their incursion into the US market forthwith.  The tradeoff was that the most promising of the Genesis titles would transfer to the auspices of the US Bullpen.  In practice, Clan Destine was pretty much the only survivor.  Even DEATH'S HEAD II was dumped overboard without a second thought.

Marvel NY, to their credit, put some muscle behind this.  In addition to their first appearance herein, they also garnered a preview edition.  M-UK had also generated some pre publicity with  magazine articles and a trading card attached to the cover of COMICS WORLD magazine here in the UK. 

1992: WARHEADS Issue 1 (Marvel UK)

From 1992: WARHEADS issue 1, the official start of the MARVEL UKverse!

This copy is still bagged and sealed with the original "Genesis Seal", a brief scheme by the British Bullpen to cross-promote the new fortnightly OVERKILL, an anthology of the original "Genesis Five" books (WARHEADS, MOTORMOUTH, HELL'S ANGEL, THE KNIGHTS OF PENDRAGON and DIGITEK).

What the sticky plug neglects to mention is that, in terms of strips, Overkill readers were under served: The US editions contained twice as many strip pages that each story received in Overkill.  But... were the Overkill versions (heavily) edited... or were the US versions padded?

Warheads were a team of dimension-jumping mercenary scavengers employed by Mys-Tech (the hitherto unknown movers and shakers of this part of Marvel Earth) to jump between worlds and dimensions to grab new technology for the benefit of their employers.  A really nice idea oft-undermined by their continuing encounters with existing sales-boasting Marvel characters.  

Nick Vince was the writer, Gary Erskine supplied the stunning art and John Freeman was editor.  

The book eventually ran for fourteen regular issues and a two-part limited series.  Plans for more were terminated (without mercy) in the Genesis Massacre. 

1993: DEATH-WRECK and DEATH METAL House Ad (Marvel UK)

From November 1993: A MARVEL UK House Ad promoting two DEATH'S HEAD II spin-off/ knock-off books... DEATH-WRECK and DEATH METAL.  

I remember thinking at the time that things must be pretty desperate if they were cloning DHII and spinning-off more books... and that this couldn't last.  It turns out I was right.

The books themselves aren't bad but, by this point, Death's Head II was so over-exposed that we needed a bit of a rest... not two more similar characters.  Especially, as was often the case with the Genesis Books, there's always the sense that someone came up with the names first and then crafted a book and character around the title.  

Simon Furman created the original DEATH'S HEAD but had been shoved aside by the previous year's revamp.  

Both of these series ran for the designated four issues... which makes them amongst the last of the M-UK line to appear before the Genesis Massacre hit.  

Neither of these strips appeared in the UK line.  

The adds themselves are in the late-Genesis House Style of bizarre captions.  Presumably the top one is a dig at the Image guys.... naming no names. 

1993: REDMIST 2020 House Ad (Marvel Uk)

Another Mighty Marvel UK What If: a UK advert for the it-never-happened REDMIST 2020 multi-book event from MARVEL UK's GENESIS line.  

Apparently the material for these three new interconnected new launches was actually on the way to the printers (and I've wondered, on several occasions, whether the freebie trading cards went to print earlier than the main book) when the GENESIS IMPLOSION hit and the orders came down from upon high to suspend most of the British Bullpen's publishing plans.  

None of the three new books ('ROID RAGE, DEATH DUTY and BLOODRUSH... three very nineties titles) ever made it into print and, of the two crossovers, only SUPER SOLDIERS 8 hit the shelves.  That proved to be the title's finale and the ninth issue was lost.  WILD THING stalled after issue seven and neither of the two-parts of the crossover appeared.  

The 'Implosion' was only supposed to put M-UK's new launches on hiatus (and clear out some of the underperforming titles, like SUPER SOLDIERS, CYBERSPACE 3000 etc) in order to slim down the line until the market stabilized in the wake of the speculator crash.  However, it turned into the "Genesis Massacre" when the whole line was shuttered at the end of 1993.  Everything already on hiatus was chopped alongside the implosion survivors.  Wipe out. 

But... just look at the list of the creators attached to these books...

1993: OVERKILL MONTHLY House Ad (Marvel UK)

This MARVEL UK House Ad, which appeared in December 1993, touted the relaunched OVERKILL which boasted an increased page count (and cover price) but also a reduced schedule (from fortnightly to monthly).  

The shift was part of the GENESIS IMPLOSION which saw sweeping retrenchments (read: cancellations) across the US-focued line as the British Bullpen tried to cope with orders suddenly falling-off the cliff.  Overkill, presumably, wasn't subject to the same woes (it was, after all, primarily intended for UK newsagents) but the schedule change suggested that it too was suffering from flaccid sales.  

The Implosion swiftly turned into a MASSACRE when Marvel, without warning, deemed the entire UK imprint (even the annoyingly ubiquitous DEATH'S HEAD II) surplus to requirements and closed the lot.  Overkill, flush with a backlog of strips, soldiered on into the New Year but it really felt like it was on borrowed time...

1993: CLANDESTINE HOUSE AD (Marvel UK)

This is another MARVEL UK 'What If?"... but this one actually happened.  

The British Bullpen, as this Ad shows, were planning to launch CLANDESTINE (which, along with LOOSE CANNONS, would have gone a long way to rebuilding their tarnished reputation after the dash for market share put quantity over quality) in January 1994.

The four-parter was caught-up in the Genesis Massacre that engulfed the line at the end of the year but, unlike its stablemates, it did emerge as part of the US line later in the year (the 'Genesis Aftermath').  And as a regular series.

Davis departed his own creation after the eighth issue, leaving it in the care of Glen Dakin (and ex M-UK artists Rinaldi and Hitch) for the next four issues before it shuttered.  Davis, who returned to the team in 1996, subsequently dismissed the Dakin stories as a dream.

1994: COMIC WORLD REPORTS THE MARVEL UK GENESIS MASSACRE

From COMIC WORLD MAGAZINE issue 25 (March 1994): the moment MARVEL UK's 'Genesis Implosion' became the 'Genesis Massacre', the complete closure of the US-focused operation.

The cuts of late 1993 hadn't boded well for the Annex of Ideas, stalling a lot of upcoming UK-Verse projects (and closing some existing titles and the entire FRONTIER imprint) in an attempt to avert the glut of new material flooding into a collapsing market (presumably calculated, at least in part, by which of the imminent releases had still managed to generate reasonable orders from retailers and distributors) but this was total wipe-out.

All of the 'parked' projects (many of which had several issues already completed and more partially-completed and work-in-progress) were officially scrapped and any title that had managed to escape the implosion was also cancelled.  

To get a sense of how bad things were at the end:  According to Capital Distributors (long-gone in the great distributor shake-up of the nineties - thanks Marvel - but big at the time and publisher of their own version of PREVIEWS in the form of ADVANCE COMICS), retailer orders for the 16th, and final, issue of DEATH'S HEAD II were down to 7,400 copies.  A far cry from the 105,900 they had moved of the first issue in late 1992.  CYBERSPACE 3000, another last survivor, had seen 55,400 copies of its first issue shifted through Capital but, eight months later, that figure had plummeted to 4,350 for the finale. 

It's worth noting that, in today's much reduced industry, numbers like this probably aren't exceptional.  And, of course, Capital wasn't the only distributor handling M-UK product so these are far from final figures.  And they have to be seen in the context of an over-expanded business which was going through some very drastic right-sizing.  Sales were down across the board although, as many of the M-UK books were seen as peripheral to the main Marvel offering, they were more vulnerable to readers and retailers trimming their sails. 

The few survivors of the massacre were: 

CLANDESTINE which had initially been slated for January '94 and eventually appeared, under the auspices of Marvel New York later in the year.  

DOCTOR WHO: AGE OF CHAOS had been placed on indefinite hiatus in the Implosion but, although plans for a four-issue US run died here, it did surface in the summer of 1994 as a one-shot magazine-format special in the UK.  Work was still ongoing when the US version was abandoned and, as a result, yet-to-be-drawn splash pages were dropped.  To date, it has never been reprinted. 

WILD ANGELS was to have been a four-parter for a January '94 premiere (House Ads appeared in other M-UK books) and eventually surfaced, presumably because Pino Rinaldi supplied the art, as a black and white digest compilation courtesy of Panini's Italian division. 

A lot of seemingly commercially still viable work was also lost in Marvel's haste to draw a line under the whole experience.  The LOOSE CANNONS four-parter had already generated a fair amount of heat in the fan press and looked like a potential winner (if not in its original format, possibly in book form).  The DEATH'S HEAD II/ PUNISHER combo, scheduled for 1994, probably sounds more juicy now than it did at the time considering how frequently both characters popped-up in every conceivable crossover and cameo.  Nevertheless, it might have started DHII's rehabilitation and integration into the US-verse.  A lot of the other books, from creative teams that latterly became big industry names, seem greater losses in retrospect than they did at the time (which is not, of course, to underestimate the sense of disappointment and sense of loss (and loss of income) of anyone who has toiled on a creative project only to discover it would never see the light of day). 

The UK-verse was left in the care of Marvel New York but, frankly, they didn't seem to notice.  The collapsing industry, and Marvel's over-extended financial obligations, were a sufficient distraction for staff (those that survived the regular restructurings and rounds of redundancy) to prevent anyone (until this year) taking a punt on a roster of failed characters.  

Marvel also had their 2099 future-universe to play with.  Launched in 1992, it was more commercially viable because it feature possible-future (so, like the M-UK books, it had no real impact on Marvel's main universe) versions of bankable characters.  It still petered out in 1998.  

Marvel acquired the MALIBU ULTRAVERSE in late 1994 (the official reason, to snap-up Malibu's state-of-the-art coloring technology, was a smokescreen to hide the real reason: DC were about to pounce on the very busy upstart and Marvel's owners were concerned that a sale would cost them their position as numero uno in the industry, vital for keeping the share price inflated) and promptly tried to integrate the characters into the Marvel line.  Plenty of crossovers followed but Marvel eventually ran the whole thing into the ground... and (for various legal and financial reasons) hasn't touched the characters since.