For those not enamoured of The Brotherhood's ABBA-styled warblings, they could always take heart in the fact that Showaddywaddy were at Number Two, with You Got What It Takes.
To be honest, it wasn't a classic chart, that week.
It looks like we were all going to have to take refuge instead in the Marvel UK Hit Parade.
Spider-Man hits the moment that stretches credulity too far for even my youthful mind, as Stegron brings a bunch of dinosaur skeletons back to life.
I think the fact that they're glowing while he does it only serves to make it seem all the more ludicrous and overly-fantastical for the web-spinner's strip.
Elsewhere, The FF are still having their Thundra/Frightful Four entanglement, Captain Britain is still battling a vampire werewolf, and the Avengers and Defenders are still fighting Dormammu for the Evil Eye.
I have no idea at all what happens in this issue, and the cover doesn't do anything to quell my ignorance.
I suspect the Hulk is still on the rampage, following Jarella's death, but don't quote me on that.
I don't have a clue what Dracula's up to this issue, other than draining some young woman of her blood, which he does basically every issue, so the cover's not really telling me anything new.
Just two more issues to go before we have to wave goodbye to the comic we barely ever knew.
Interesting to see Captain Savage now sharing the cover with the man after whom the publication is named.
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Good ole Cpt Savage fighting the Japs... only thing I remember was one of my teachers having a stack of comics in the classroom and Cpt Savage being among them.
Marvel UK was really in a sorry state by this point wasn't it. The US version wasn't much better but in the UK the staff must have been updating their CVs.
If I was Marvel I'd start hunting for some Sci-Fi licence they could grab to maybe bring new readers in.
Quite right about those Spidey dinosaur skeletons Steve - Marvel should have stuck to the plausible, realistic stuff about superpowers derived from radioactive spider bites.
Was CB up against a vampire werewolf, or was it a vampire and a werewolf? I recall the latter but my memory of it is pretty vague (it does seem like quite a coincidence now I think about it).
Prescient Fury cover there, what with the odd nazi still occasionally sniping about fire and fury...
-sean
Charlie, I'm afraid I still, to this day, have never seen a Captain Savage story.
Aggy, It's all looking grim but we shouldn't write them off yet. We're mere weeks away from the launch of some titanic new titles...
Sean, Cap's foe, the Black Baron, was both a vampire and a werewolf and bore a remarkable physical resemblance to Dracula.
Why do they insist on adding dumb captions to these UK covers?
Unless that T Rex chews his food I don't see what's so scary about being eaten by it. Alimentary my dear Felixch, as James Bond would say.
Captain Savage was a spin-off from Sgt. Fury. He was the commanding officer of a submarine, and appeared in about a half dozen stories in which the Howling Commandos were transported by sub en route to their missions.
His spin-off series, Captain Savage and His Leatherneck Raiders, transferred him from the European theater to the Pacific, and had him leading a Marine Raider squad. Which made no sense. A submarine officer would not have the right training or experience for a commando-type job, and a Navy captain (equivalent to a full colonel in the Army or Marines) would not be assigned to lead such a small unit. (Nick Fury was a buck sergeant and a squad leader, so he was in a job appropriate for his rank. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were military veterans, so, unlike Gary Freidrich, they understood the technical details.)
Marvel seemed to lack confidence in the Savage series' ability to stand on its own. Fury and the Howlers guest starred in the first issue, Baron Strucker and Hydra were the villains in #2-5, and Lt. Ben Grimm was in #7. The Raiders were not allowed to ride the bike without training wheels.
After the comic was cancelled, one of the character, a Native American named (IIRC) Private Little Bear, somehow joined up with Combat Kelly and His Deadly Dozen. Having a Marine assigned to an Army squad made even less sense than a Navy officer leading a Marine Corps squad. But that's Marvel war comics.
Marvel's war comics in many ways were just an extension of their superhero comics. They were more like swashbuckling adventures than war tales. (But I admit to only having read a few dozen.)
Actually to me the most "realistic" Sgt Fury was issue #100 which was set in the present 1972 (I was 11 when I bought it off the spinner!). Fury and the Howlers are at a get together / commemorative banquet and I think their Jewish Commando Izzy is assassinated by a neo-nazi. Did you guys get to #100 in the reprints? Was it sold in the UK?
I have to dig this out of the long box and reread it. I honestly have not read it since 1972 which is 45 FORKING YEARS AGO AND NOW I FEEL REALLY, REALLY, OLD!!! THANKS FOR RUINING MY DAY STEVE, lol!
(OK, I know... according to President Cheetoh there are some good neo nazis out there...)
Anyhow, DC had much more "realistic" war comics though they too were typically situations involving impossible odds. But, their missions were resolved by guns, not super heroics.
Kubert's and Heath's art were just really well suited for war comics and DC made the most of their talents imho.
I hate to sound like a broken record but in the UK did you get DC comics or DC War Comics? You are familiar with Sgt. Rock, the Haunted Tank, The Losers, etc.?
As an odd twist, Kirby drew about a half dozen issues of the Losers in the earlier 1970s. Though his art had become somewhat of a parody of itself by this time, it just seemed profoundly suitable for that war comic. I don't know why; I'm not a schooled artist. But there is just something really appealing about that little run on the Losers. Hail the King!
I love Kirby's run on the Losers. I got the sense of getting the story from a witness, a guy who knows what it was like, which he did. They were short, contained, powerful stories bursting with metal and kinetic energy. The dialogue was kinda cornball, but who cares.
I liked the Haunted Tank too. A Sherman tank was a dangerous place to be in W.W.2. I think I liked it because my cousin gave me a copy in the mid-seventies, when I was a little kid. The Germans put the brain of an S.S. colonel into a robot, then that robot went rogue like all robots do, and the crew of the Haunted Tank had to stop it.
M.P.
Charlie, we did indeed get DC comics in the UK. Basically, anything that was available in America was available in Britain. Even the likes of Dell and Gold Key comics were available. Having said that, the only US war comic I ever used to buy was Weird War Tales, thanks to it having a supernatural base.
Dangermash, I've always had a soft spot for gratuitous speech balloons on covers. I think I've mentioned in the past my love of Exposition Bystander, that man in the hat, who used to turn up on the covers of Silver Age Marvel comics, gratuitously explaining what was going on, with such phrases as, "Loki is using Thor's own hammer against him! He doesn't stand a chance!"
TC, thanks for the Captain Savage info.
MP, I never bought any issues of The Haunted Tank when I was a kid. I had this idea, from the title, that every issue involved a crew being chased around the inside of their tank, by a ghost, which, given the small amount of space inside a tank, seemed a somewhat restricting premise.
There's a Captain Savage story where he and his squad dress up as women, though I haven't read it except for one page.
The tank was not haunted per se. A descendent of JEB Stuart, a southern civil war general, was offered guidance by the general since he was commander of a Stuart tank during WW2. Given today's political climate he probably should have been in a Sherman tank...
Yeah, Kirby's Losers run was brilliant. It had authenticity to it, but put over with the frenzied expressionism of his 70s peak, so it came across as unrestrained whereas the more conventionally realistic work of Joe Kubert and Russ Heath were great to look at but felt a bit limited by the comics code.
Well, thats my take on it anyway.
Personally, my taste in war comics as a kid tended more toward the unhinged (no comics code here!) like Darkie's Mob by Mike Western and John Wagner, from Battle. Its fair to say that there was a lot of rubbish in Battle too of course; even so, the idea that old Marvel reprints could compete seriously with it suggests a deep cynicism toward the target readership.
-sean
I always enjoyed the U.K. War Annuals like Victor, Valiant, and Hotspur, But to me they had both D.C.-like stories and Marvel -like war stories. You had the best of both concepts!
Captain Hurricane, eh Charlie?
There were loads of war comics when I was a kid - the British were obsessed with the war in the 70s (not like now of course:) - but a lot of them tended to be formulaic and old fashioned.
The thing about Battle was that Pat Mills and John Wagner began trying to bring the IPC boys comics more up to date with the mid-70s culture generally, and while it wasn't exactly Action, let alone 2000AD (they had better war stories with Hellman and Fiends of the Eastern Front respectively), there was enough good work for it to be a big improvement on Victor or Warlord.
-sean
In the '80s I had a book about all the songs which had reached #1 in the UK and in the entry for "Angelo" it said that Angelo and his girlfriend had died from exhaustion...what ??? Had they bothered to listen to the words:
They took their lives that night...
Steve, The Complete Fantastic Four and Rampage are indeed fast approaching but don't forget that in late October 1977 Marvel UK launched their first ever monthly "Savage Sword Of Conan" #1 - you'll have to make a separate post for that I assume ?
Loved ole Cpt Hurricane!
Is there a more iconic UK War Annual cover than Victor Annual 1973? That cover still grabs me 44 years later! For someone on this side of the pond it's got some UK "symbols" for us: the double-decker-ish red bus, the UK helmets and guns...
Valiant 1966 is a fun one too!
Colin, was that the The Guinness Book of Number One Singles by Paul Gambaccini, Mike Read and Tim Rice? If so, I had that one too. It was an awesome book.
And fear not, I haven't forgotten those Marvel UK monthly mags. I haven't decided how I'll tackle them yet though.
Charlie, that was the only Victor annual I ever had. I've got a post about it somewhere on this blog Sadly, I can barely remember anything about the book's contents. I remember there being a tale about a mysterious runner and another one about a goat. Was there a story about a boy with an army of tiny robot soldiers or was that in another book completely?
Good heavens Man! How can I remember what I read 45 years ago, LOL! But now that you say it, I have a recollection about a goat. As far as the tiny robot soldiers, that is/was a recurring theme throughout all the UK annuals, as I recall, so I can't speak to the specifics but it is quite probably correct.
Anyhow, those particular issues are sitting at my folks house 55 miles away. Next time I am there I will review and get back to you? Or are you desperate and I should saddle up the horse and try to find out sooner, LOL. Let me know!
I am impressed you have any recollection at all about the insides of an Annual since there were so many stories and they were much shorter than a comic book. Most impressive!!!
Charlie, thanks to the power of Google, I've now discovered that the boy with the remote control toy soldiers was called General Jumbo and he was an occasionally recurring character in The Beano.
I remember the goat story because it featured the word, "Dais," which was the first time I'd ever encountered it and I had to ask my dad what it meant.
Come to think of it, I think the annual might also have featured the word, "Gaol." It was the first time I'd ever encountered that particular spelling of the word and I had to ask my dad what that meant as well.
Lt. Jeb Stuart and his crew *did* switch to a Sherman tank in later years, after their Stuart tank was destroyed in battle. The ghost of General Stuart remained their guardian angel until the end of the series, though.
Given the current political climate, there will probably be Antifa peaceful protesters peacefully firebombing comic book shops that sell back issues of G.I. Combat.
Steve W - what does Gaol and Dais mean???
TC - Well, he did have a Sherman tank in the end so it's a split... a ghost that fought to uphold slavery sheparding a Sherman tank through its tribulations is quite ironic in it's own way I guess. I wonder if DC realized the irony???
Charlie, "Gaol," is an archaic spelling of, "Jail," and a dais is a raised platform.
Thanks sir! SHould I encounter those words today, I am ready!
Forget Victor, Charlie - if you're going to dig out some old stuff you'd be better off tring to find that 1966 Valiant annual. It has some great full colour artwork by the brilliant Don Lawrence inside.
-sean
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