Power Comics

"-style British comic papers supplemented by a small amount of Marvel material, while the last two were more magazine-like in style and were dominated by their Marvel content.

History

When Odhams obtained the rights to reprint Marvel material in the UK, they started by incorporating superhero stories such as The Fantastic Four into their existing titles "Wham!" and "Smash!". This Marvel material was reproduced in black and white, and serialized in short instalments alongside the original British strips which still dominated the content of these comics. "Smash!" also reprinted the Batman newspaper strip to cash in on the popularity of the live action TV show.

Power Comics took more concrete form with the appearance of "Pow!" and "Fantastic" early in 1967. 'The first issue of "Pow!" appeared on 14th January 1967, by which time "Wham!" had reached issue 136 and "Smash!" was at issue 51. "Pow!" was similar in format to the two earlier comics, with a mixture of traditional British material and Marvel reprints — in this case Spider-Man and Nick Fury.

"Fantastic" first appeared on 11 February 1967, and was quite different in style from its predecessors. In many ways it looked more like one of the American black-and-white anthology magazines of the time such as "Creepy" and "Eerie" than a traditional British comic like "The Beano". It appeared to be aimed at an older audience than the latter, though a younger one than the American magazines. The contents of "Fantastic" was dominated by Marvel superheroes such as The Mighty Thor, the X-Men and Iron Man, with only a minimal amount of original British material. In general appearance, style and content, "Fantastic" can be considered a direct precursor of the Marvel UK weeklies such as The Mighty World Of Marvel that appeared during the 1970s.

The number of Power Comics titles was brought to five on 8 April 1967 with the first appearance of "Terrific", which was similar in format to "Fantastic" and was again dominated by Marvel reprint material such as The Avengers, (Doctor Strange) and the Sub-Mariner.

The Power Comics line remained at five titles for nine months, after which it started to dwindle. "Wham!" was merged into "Pow!" on 13 January 1968, while "Terrific" merged into "Fantastic" three weeks later. This left three Power titles for just over six months, after which "Pow!" and "Fantastic" were merged into "Smash!" in September and November 1968 respectively. "Smash!" continued to reprint small quantities of Marvel material for a few more months, but early in 1969 Odhams was taken over by IPC Media and Power Comics ceased to exist.

tyle and content

Power Comics was the first attempt to integrate elements of American superhero comics into mainstream British comic publishing, motivated by the huge success of Stan Lee's line of Marvel Comics in the USA. Besides reprinting many of Marvel's most popular series such as Spider-Man and the X-Men, there was also an attempt to fill out the "Power universe" with a home-grown British superhero called Johnny Future who appeared in "Fantastic" prior to its merger with "Terrific".

As well as drawing heavily on Stan Lee's creative output, Power Comics also attempted to emulate Lee's chatty style and community building efforts through their own editors known as Alf and Bart on some titles and Alf and Cos on others. "Alf" was Odhams editor Alf Wallace. Each title had its own letter column (such as "Fantastic Fan-mail"), but also a half-page editorial ("News from the Floor of 64", a reference to the editorial offices at 64 Long Acre in London) that was common to all Power Comics and comparable in style and purpose to Marvel's "Bullpen Bulletins".

Unlike the otherwise similar Marvel UK reprints of the 1970s, the Marvel material in Power Comics was edited quite heavily to replace American spellings and slang with their British equivalents. Dialogue and/or images were also changed occasionally to rectify continuity problems caused by the lack of synchronisation between reprints of different storylines.

One of the more controversial aspects of Power Comics was the relative lack of credit given to Marvel Comics and the American creators of the material used. For the first few weeks of the Marvel reprints the company was not acknowledged at all, but the company then had a change of heart and published a letter from a reader pointing out the origin of the strips. Marvel credit panels containing the names of Stan Lee and collaborators such as Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby were also airbrushed out. Apart from the statutory copyright acknowledgement in small print, the name "Marvel" was never mentioned — wherever it appeared in the originals it was changed to "Power". Marvel continued to be mentioned periodically however. For example when the Hulk was removed from "Smash!", the editors admitted their reprints had caught up with the American original. After a gap of several months, the Hulk reappeared, this time in Fantastic.

Trivia

A distinctive feature of both "Fantastic" and "Terrific" was the full-colour pin-up that appeared on the back cover of most issues. Many of these were reprinted from American Marvel comics, but at least some (including a Johnny Future pin-up) were produced especially for Power Comics by a young Barry Windsor-Smith.

External links

* [http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/j/jonfutur.htm A page about Johnny Future]
* [http://www.comicsmagazines.com/fantastics.htm A page of cover scans from "Fantastic"]
* [http://lewstringer.blogspot.com/2007/01/40-year-flashback-pow-no1.html Photos of Pow! comic]