Rampage!

Unless my maths fail me, this week is the fortieth anniversary of the launch of the comic that let us know Marvel UK meant business when it came to fighting back against the nightmarish forces of  falling sales and dwindling market share.

Why?

Because, hot on the heels of The Complete Fantastic Four, the company launched Rampage which replicated that other comic's formula of reprinting an entire issue of a team title each week.

In this case, that title was The Defenders.

Unlike the FF, the self-declared non-team had no ancient stories to use as back-up tales and so, in this comic, the subsidiary strip was provided by the man called Nova, which meant that one thing was for sure.

We were going to be getting an awful lot of art by Sal Buscema in the months to come.

As with The Complete Fantastic Four, I had very few issues of Rampage.

In fact, I think I may have had just one - issue #10 - which wrapped up the Evil Eye Saga.

Such a thing must have been more than a little confusing for new readers, as the comic hadn't bothered reprinting the Evil Eye Saga itself - thanks to it already having been published in Spider-Man's book - meaning this mag jumped straight from the epic's prologue to its epilogue, with nothing in between.

As for me, my lack of issues of this new title didn't matter in the slightest, as I had a great big pile of the original Defenders comics.

Thinking about it, this may have been the first great flaw with the comic's concept. Unlike the Fantastic Four, it seemed to be ridiculously easy to get hold of Defenders comics. You seemed to be able to get them everywhere, which can't exactly have created massive demand for the UK reprints.

The other flaw, of course, was that, as with The Complete Fantastic Four, it was madness to reprint an entire monthly comic every week, meaning that, if successful, it would have quickly caught up with the source material and be rendered no longer viable.

Fortunately, Marvel UK avoided that problem by scrapping the comic after just thirty four issues.

Unlike other cancellations, however, this turned out not to be a retreat so much as a change of tactics and, after that last fateful issue, Rampage switched from being Marvel UK's latest weekly mag to being their latest monthly.

But that venture is a story for another day. All that mattered right now was that the company was suddenly publishing a massive four titles a week, which might not have seemed that great but it was at least a turn around from the recent story of cancellations and mergers and gave hope that the company's future wasn't, after all, one of imminent and inevitable extinction.

Of course, what really matters with any comic isn't the contents. It's the free gift that comes with it. And, true to recent form, Marvel UK decided to give away a model plane with issue #1.

At least this time it wasn't a Boeing.

It was a Concorde.

What a Concorde has to do with the Defenders or Nova, I have no idea but I'm sure it was a wonderful thing to behold.