Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon.
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Hold on to your hat, World, because it's 1983 and a whole new sensation is about to hit you!
It's true. January of that year saw a thing called the internet arrive to punch us in the eyeballs with a level of worldwide webbiness that even Spider-Man could only watch and envy.
That's because, as I often ruminate upon, it was the month in which the migration of the ARPANET to TCP/IP was officially completed. An event now seen as the birth of the true Internet.
Quite what the False Internet was, I dread to think but I'm certainly glad I never lived to encounter it.
And it wasn't the only thing occurring that month. After all, in the United Kingdom, red rain was falling, due to sand from the Sahara being contained within its droplets. Whether that event inspired the Peter Gabriel song of the same name, I could not say.
Rather more prosaically, it was also the month in which seatbelt use for UK drivers and front seat passengers became mandatory, eleven years after inclusion of the device became compulsory in new cars.
While all this was going on, the British singles chart gave us no less than three Number Ones.
Rather more prosaically, it was also the month in which seatbelt use for UK drivers and front seat passengers became mandatory, eleven years after inclusion of the device became compulsory in new cars.
While all this was going on, the British singles chart gave us no less than three Number Ones.
The first was Save Your Love by Renee and Renato which was followed by Phil Collins' You Can't Hurry Love which, itself, was then deposed by Men at Work's Down Under.
Over on the British albums chart, the month began with The John Lennon Collection on top. That was then replaced by Various Artists' Raiders of The Pop Charts before that was forced to make way for the rise to supremacy of Men at Work's Business As Usual.
Over on the British albums chart, the month began with The John Lennon Collection on top. That was then replaced by Various Artists' Raiders of The Pop Charts before that was forced to make way for the rise to supremacy of Men at Work's Business As Usual.
It's true. Daredevil gets himself a book of his own!
And he's not the only star of it. For, it also stars Captain Britain and Spider-Man!
In Captain Britain's tale, the Fury's killed our hero but Merlyn and Roma resurrect him and send him back home.
And Daredevil's got problems, as well, because Bullseye's decided to strike at him, through the Black Widow.
Meanwhile, the Spider-Man tale's from the 1960s and features the death of Fred Foswell, as he attempts to save J Jonah Jameson from the clutches of the Kingpin.
After all, with the demise of Rampage, Marvel UK finds itself down to just seven magazines a month.
Still, not to despair. Their slot in that mag may be gone but the X-Men barely break stride by transferring straight over to Marvel Super-Heroes.
And they do so in style, with the grand conclusion of the Phoenix Saga in which Jean Grey tragically corks it.
The Avengers, meanwhile, find themselves battling a slightly less stellar threat when the giant robot Red Ronin goes on the loose in the streets of New York.
And we finish with a four-page Night-Raven tale called White Hopes, Red Nightmares.
And, for those still not satisfied, we also get a look at the 3rd Doctor serial Planet of the Daleks and at the ever-popular Target novels.
I know little of the contents of this month's offering but I do know it contains a Blake's 7 picture strip that's called Debris and is brought to us by the powerhouse pairing of Paul Neary and Phil Gascoine.
In this one, something is happening. I don't know what it is but I reckon it's bound to involve at least one sorcerer, at least one monster, and an endangered damsel who is at least one in number.
The word "Crom" will probably also feature.
There's also an interview with Harrison Ford and a look at the brand-new film that's wowing the world's horror fans. That film is known as The Evil Dead.
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33 comments:
I just came across that Starburst the other week whilst I was sorting out the box of them in the loft. I cleared out all the chaff from 1983 and 1984 but I kept this one.
Nice to see you’re continuing the Marvel monthlies from 40 years ago. There’s a massive one on the horizon for next month, is there not? Prepare for a lot of waffle on that from me. A lot.
A pedant writes -
Shouldn't that be 'Marvel UK monthlies, 39 years and 11 months ago this month', Steve?
Anyway, what gives? I was expecting the American comics from this month 50 years ago! Presumably January was just too short to contain all the exciting stuff you had planned for last month. Or possibly its your freewheeling sense of time again, like with 2000AD...?
Not that I'm complaining - its good to see you haven't abandoned the UK monthlies. Even if it seems like readers at the time were.
The only mag I'm familiar with here is that issue of Marvel Super-Heroes. Not sure how exactly, as I had X-Men #137... but I do recall reading 'White Hopes, Red Nightmares' (actually the second part of that Night-Raven story). Its the one in which Alan Moore first took the character out of the 30s gangster milieu, and started doing something a bit more interesting with the series.
This may not be entirely unconnected to what Matthew is planning to waffle about a lot. I suspect he won't be the only one.
-sean
Sean, Colin pointed out that I'd forgotten to do them last month. Therefore, I'm doing them now.
Matthew, I'm not sure what the massive one is. Whatever it is, I shall look forward to it keenly.
I don’t know if the ‘real world’ Red Rain inspired the Peter Gabriel song, but I suspect the song influenced the similarly titled Doug Moench / Kelly Jones Batman comic. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the song title was also pinched by Kim Newman for the title of his very first ‘Anno Dracula’ story, ‘Red Reign’.
Interesting — Men At Work and Phil Collins were also in the American Top Ten this week in 1983 — ‘Down Under’ was #2 and ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ was #10. Toto’s ‘Africa’ was #1 (the only time one of their singles topped the charts, apparently).
b.t.
Funnily enough b.t., 'Africa' was a top ten hit in the UK, which was unusual for a band like that - most of that kind of rock music didn't register much here at all in the 80s. I'm sure I've mentioned here before that the first time I ever heard 'Don't Stop Believin'' by Journey was at the end of the last episode of the Sopranos, and I don't think thats too unusual.
'Africa' had more of a camp appeal than most of that stuff, although since then the passage of time seems to have added irony to middle of the road '80s rock music in general ('yacht rock').
-sean
Ahhhh, 1983 is (was) a year close to my heart. So much pop cultural goodness. Plus I graduated from college, and bought my first cd player! Not sure which of those last two events had the most impact....ehhhhh., probably college.
That debut from Men at Work was terrific. Even if I didn't get all the references at first. Hil Collins was OK, and I did enjoy "Africa ". Not a bad start to the year, musically...
Redartz, I didn't buy a CD player until 1989 - were CDs even available in the UK in 1983?
Ah, but it's not true that Jean Grey "tragically corks it" at the end of the Dark Phoenix saga, Steve, because it was really the Phoenix Force just pretending to be Jean all along!
'Africa' is one of those songs that gets played on a semi-regular basis in my local Tesco.
Colin- it was pretty late in 1983 when I bought that cd player. And it was pricey. Don't recall what the unit cost, but the first 2 cds were about 20 dollars each. Incidentally, those first discs were the Police "Ghost in the Machine " and a classical disc- Ravel's "Bolero".
Oh, and to pay for that musical bonanza- I sold my complete run of "X-Men". Yes, from issue 1, and including Giant Size X-Men 1. In hindsight, not my best tradeoff...
Steve
I'm pretty sure Daredevils #1 was also published this month. Annoyingly the first issue doesn't appear to have a cover date, however #6 was cover dated June 1983, hence #1 should have been released in January (also confirmed by wiki - which is never wrong). If so, probably the most influential Marvel UK come ever, finally starts its legendary eleven (count them) issue run.
DW
Thanks, DW. Tonight, I shall add it to the post.
DW, I'd stopped buying Marvel UK's output by this point so I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not about 'Daredevils' being described as "influential" and "legendary".
RIP 'Rampage' - I hadn't known the mag had ended with the December '82 issue either. The first issue (which I bought) was dated July 1978 so 'Rampage' had lasted for four and-a-half years which is a respectable run I suppose.
Can't speak for DW, Colin, but I'm reasonably sure his comment there is sarcasm-free (apart from possibly the bit about the wiki).
Although I'd say its the legendary Alan Moore/Alan Davis run on Captain Brexit that started in 'Daredevils' which is influential, rather than the mag itself.
-sean
Charlie got a CD player around 1986.And perhaps the first CD played in it was NOW THATS WHAT I CALL MUSIC” by VARIOUS ARTISTS.” Picked it up in London whilst visiting my brother. Good times!
Charlie, my first two CDs were called 'Motown Chartbusters' Volume Something Something...
Sorry to go off at a tangent, but...
Beano artist has passed away:
https://uk.yahoo.com/style/david-sutherland-obituary-161303081.html
Phillip
Issue #1 of The Daredevils has now been added to the post.
Colin
Yes I was mostly being serious. As well as the very influential Moore/Davis Captain Britain, which really hits its stride within the pages of The Daredevils, we also got Miller Daredevil, Moore Night Raven text stories, and some interesting back-ups (remember the Moore/Collins/Farmer Dourdevil?). Also, the various Inside Comics articles (again, mostly by Moore) actually took their subject seriously. Particularly once the ill-suited Spider-man reprints departed. Its a shame that it only lasted eleven issues as it really was a great leap forward. Embarrassingly, I didn't pick up each issue as they were published, despite browsing through the first issue and wondering where Captain Britain's big stick had gone. Once I did back fill the issues I thought, and still do, that the titles was/is Marvel UK's peak. I did lose the free badge, however, which I wouldn't have worn in public because in my school that would have likely ended badly ;-)
Thanks for posting the cover Steve.
DW
DW, not picking up Daredevils from the start isn't embarrassing at all. The early episodes of Captain Brexit - trigger warning: possibly controversial opinion ahead - aren't that great really, I don't think.
The first - in #1 - is interesting mainly in retrospect, once you know more about the rest of the series; and as a kind of dry run for Moore's approach to reviving and retconning a character he'd just killed off, which he refined later in the year in Swamp Thing. But at the time it just seemed like an account of CB's history, the sort of thing you might expect to see in a first issue.
The series didn't get to be a must-read til the Special Executive arrived, in (I think) Daredevils #5. Moore seemed to have sorted out a way of adapting his writing style to Marvel by then, and theres a sudden, very noticeable improvement in Alan Davis' artwork too, more like what he'd been doing on Marvelman.
(On a hunch I had a quick look at Steve's 2000AD post for this month, and Davis was in the middle of Harry Twenty On The High Rock every week for January '83, so... maybe he had a heavy work load during the early Daredevils).
Its impressive what Moore and Davis packed into seven issues.
Night-Raven wasn't added to the line up til... Daredevils #6?
I think my favourite article was Moore's 'Blinded By The Hype: An Affectionate Character Assassination of Stan Lee' (;
-sean
PS The mag reprinted full issues of Miller's Daredevil, so of course if you hadn't been reading the US comic there was more reason to get it. Even so, early on its still the stuff with Roger McKenzie writing, so not as good as it'd get.
Mind you, those are probably the US Daredevil issues that most people had missed, and iirc weren't easy to come by at a reasonable price in '83.
-sean
Embarrassing only that the title wasn't commercially successful and I think that reflects poorly on us as customers (myself from and centre). Warrior was similarly impacted and also, inevitably, folded.
I think Moore's writing was ahead of pretty much everything else from the first panel of his addendum to David Thorpe's final chapter in Marvel Super Heroes. However, I agree Davis was still improving, each month, and did hit his stride around the time the Special Executive first appear. I recall he left his warehouse job, and worked on his artwork full-time, only once he'd secured work from Marvel, IPC and Quality which may well have been at this time. Yes a lot of the additional features were added during the run as a whole but as an editor, Bernie Jaye seemed fairly proactive, and the comics felt more than the sum of its parts. Its a shame it didn't work out between Bernie and Prince Andrew...
DW
(front and centre)
I can only add my agreement to the opinions here that chapters 1-4 of CB can be described as ‘finding your feet’. They’re good and everything, especially from a writing standpoint, but Alan Davis art is a bit cramped and flat, and it’s part 5 where you feel he’s relaxing and spreading out a bit.
Which segues neatly into my promised waffle…
The DDs is a huge gateway comic for me. I was a little pre-teen madly into UK comics but at the point (1982-83) where it was all getting white hot. I’d gotten into Warrior and had grown up on 2000AD which was still pretty solid. But then one Saturday afternoon I was browsing the mags in one of the big newsagents in town and came across DDs 5 and 7, with a very familiar looking style of cover art. It was a revelation: there’s another mag with Moore/Davis work and I’d missed it!
In another stroke of luck I was visiting relatives in the south a month or so later and came across issues 4 and 6 in a tiny dusty newsagent in deepest, darkest Erith. 1-3 I got for Christmas that year, but by then the whole thing had folded into MWOM.
I’m very fond of the CB story: I’m happy it stands as one of only two Moore extended runs in the world of mainstream superheroes (ie in the DC and Marvel ‘universes’). If he’d done more like this I’m sure he’d have ended up banging out landfill like Grant Morrison does these days.
And all the other stuff! The Miller DD that I’d been hearing about (that doesn’t really take off for a few months yet, but still)! All those little text pieces! That article on Miller that had a couple of recommendations of stuff I knew nothing about (Simonson’s Manhunter, Steranko, Smith)! People used to joke at the time that it should be called ‘Mighty World of Moore’, but it was that sweet spot where he was getting on with an editor and publisher and doing a ton of great stuff for them and we were the ones who benefitted from it.
It is a shame that it only lasted a year, though the CB run carried on into MWOM and for a while they were reprinting OK stuff as well: Wolverine etc. Why they couldn’t have carried on Daredevil in there is a bit of a mystery but hey.
It’s also a shame that the UK comics market was so brutal. Marvel could have provided an incubator for so much talent, for much longer. Warrior did that in theory but was constantly hamstrung by the fact that the stories were creator-owned so when Dez Skinn kept pissing the creators off they’d walk, or just send in work late or - in Steve Dillon’s case - just go completely AWOL. And you couldn’t do anything about it because you don’t own the material. So stories don’t appear regularly and you lose momentum and issues don’t make it to the stands on time.
Bernie Jaye showed you could keep creators happy on non-creator-owned projects if you treat them well, and everyone wins. I think it’s kind of telling that she came from a non-comics background and didn’t have that toxic comics business mentality.
Footnote question…
Did anyone carry on with Captain Britain after Moore left? How long did you last?
Matthew
I stuck through to the end of Captain Britain monthly (the Delano and Davis run) which at the time still felt pretty decent. I even bought the Excalibur special and first couple of issues but the magic had gone by then. The Moore/Davis and Delano/Davis trades are a nice reminder of that time.
DW
Sean - Roger McKenzie's got a couple of 'black marks' against his name, as far as I'm concerned too. In Cap A, he revived the Constrictor, but made his speech patterns the polar opposite of what they originally were. Then, he did a fill-in, during Doug Moench's Captain Marvel run (Thor vs Cap M), which, to me, seemed a false note, in many respects.
Matthew - very interesting memories/recollections. Not waffle, at all. More of this is very welcome!
Phillip
Then again, maybe it's not fair blaming Roger McKenzie, if he was asked to cover for another writer, at short notice. Obviously, as a kid, I didn't appreciate this.
Phillip
I wasn't actually having a go at Roger McKenzie there, Phillip - I just meant those were the early Miller-era DD stories before Fearless Frank started writing.
Matthew, I read a fair bit of the post-Moore Captain Brexit monthly - it seemed obligatory to give it a fair chance - but it didn't do much for me. If you weren't keen on Delano's Hellblazer, his CB is unlikely to change your mind about him.
It says a lot about the comic biz mentality that an editor not having it is considered treating the creatives 'well'...
But I'm pretty sure creators had ownership at Warrior. Equal shares with Quality, no? Still, questionable business practices meant that it didn't seem to do, say, Alan Davis much good. So I think the main factor in British comics of that era was money or, rather, the lack of it.
Not to defend poor publisher ethics, but there were limited opportunities for artists and writers to earn a living, and once a career path to America opened up I suspect most of them would have gone there anyway, even if they'd been treated a bit better.
Alan Davis has said that him and Moore both thought of the CB gig as an opportunity to get their stuff seen in the US, and get work with the parent company. Apparently at that point Moore would have killed to write the FF... but supposedly Jim Shooter thought his approach to comics wouldn't have much appeal to American readers.
-sean
PS Just to be clear: I wasn't trying to make any argument in favour of publishers owning creators work outright there.
-sean
DW, my recollection is that Bernie Jaye wasn't a teenager in the early 80s - I expect thats why Prince Andrew didn't work out...
-sean
I’m of two minds about that DAREDEVILS cover (GCD says it’s by Paul Neary, who I still mainly think of as that guy who drew stylish but kinda static Sci-fi and Horror stories for Warren, with lots of swipes from Maroto, Jeff Jones and photo reference). I like the overall composition of it, and the posing of the main DD figure is properly dynamic but the anatomy is a bit bulge-y and steroidal — looks kinda like Ron Wilson as inked by Ian Gibson. And what’s going on with DD’s back foot — is Neary trying to do that Gene Colan ‘motion blur’ effect, or is his boot just disintegrating for some reason?
b.t.
BT:
I only got to know Neary’s stuff in this period of his career so I was a bit startled by how much better his Warren stuff was when I discovered it recently. And yeah - this cover was definitely dashed off in an afternoon.
Sean:
Yeah, you’re right. I didn’t know that Davis quote about exposure. He must have been doubly pissed off when Moore refused to let Marvel US reprint CB then.
I can’t help thinking, though, that creators rights weren’t necessarily the be-all end-all for some people. Just having a place to do decent work and get paid on time must have appealed to some? Which is why The Daredevils demise seems such a shame to me.
Shooter was such a dick, wasn’t he? It’s surprising the US comics scene ever developed the way it did in the 80s swimming against that tide.
DW:
I also stuck with Captain Britain for about a year or so, out of habit more than anything else. But it just got worse and worse. Even artwork deteriorated, especially when Mark Farmer started inking it. I sold my back issues decades ago for a pittance, which of course I regret now. I did like the story with the rampaging mutating monster that has a heartbreaking ending, though.
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