Author Rob Kirby is close to completing his long awaited book on the history of Marvel UK, From Cents to Pence – but he needs some help identifying a final few strips published in some titles that were first published in Europe, probably with different titles.
“I’ve managed to identify about 75 per cent of the foreign strips that Marvel UK reprinted over the years,” Rob tells downthetubes, “a mixture of strips taken from other US publishers such as DC and Eclipse, as well as various European titles. But there are some that remain elusive.
“Hopefully, one or two downthetubes readers might have an interest in this area and be able to help. Ideally, I’d like to know the exact issues numbers for the titles the strips appeared in originally, as well as any other details that might be relevant.
“For instance, ‘The Battle of Hastings‘, may well have gone under a different name in its native publication.”
Two strips recently identified appeared in Spidey Comic and Transformers, and we’re including them here just to give you an idea of what Rob has been trying to find more details on.
“The Tough Guys”, featured in Spidey Comic #651 – a reprint of Les casseurs – Hauts et Bas à San Francisco, by writer and artist Christian Denayer and writer André-Paul Duchâteau, one of a series of adventures initially in Tintin magazine and published from 1979 to 1994 by Éditions de Lombard. This British reprint seems to have eluded online documentation, but the strip has been republished in Intégrale Les Casseurs, Tome 2 by Lombard.
“The Saga of Erik the Red”, in Transformers #21, is the work of artist J.M. Woehrel and Yves Duval, “La Saga d’Erik Randa” first appearing in Tintin.
• If you can help Rob Kirby in his quest, please do comment below. If you have never commented on the site in the past, please note that your first comments will go through an approval process, then you can comment freely (subject to good taste, politeness etc)
The founder of downthetubes, which he established in 1998. John works as a comics and magazine editor, writer, and on promotional work for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He is currently editor of Star Trek Explorer, published by Titan – his third tour of duty on the title originally titled Star Trek Magazine.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine, Babylon 5 Magazine, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics. He has also edited several comic collections, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”.
He’s the writer of “Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies” for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs” with Dave Hailwood.
Categories: downthetubes Comics News, downthetubes News
Thanks for looking this all out for me everyone – this is all super useful! I’ve passed on a few additional pages I overlooked when scanning the images here, so I’ll be interested to see what you make of these once John’s had chance to put a piece together.
At present I’m busy working my way through a complete electronic collection of The Real Ghostbusters – a super useful discovery – which wasn’t a title that I bought at the time, and therefore represented a serious gap in the material indexed. After all, I didn’t know that I was going to be working on a Marvel UK back book then, or I might have felt that I had to pick up all of their nursery titles too. From Cents to Pence!, certainly mentions them, and I’ve been building up as complete a picture as I can of what was actually released, but there’s no way that I can catalogue their precise contents to generate additional indices for these titles, alas.
Another smaller gap, due to budgetary constraints at that time, are the latter UK edition of The Thundercats, so if anyone reading this has #113 right through to the final #129, do let me know. Thanks again!
…and the dates :
27 heures prisonniers sous la mer (art : G. Van Dessel) TINTIN 489 (jan. 22, 1985)
La dramatique histoire d’Alcatraz (art : Marc-Rénier, wr : Yves Duval) TINTIN 441 (feb 21, 1984)
La bataille de Hastings (art : Decrocq – wr : Yves Duval) TINTIN 608 (may 05, 1987)
Thank you!
Now I found out that Ulf himself remember next to nothing about making this story, and doesn’t have any further information.
Otherwise I got some help in the identification by his fellow artist/ inker Johan Andreasson, and his collaborative scriptwriter Magnus Knutsson.
If you’d really like to have more information about the Betty Boop story, I guess you could try to get hold of the Norwegian editor Dag Kolstad (a.k.a. Dick Kolby) for querying.
I don’t know about his contact information, however.