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.

Random comics I have owned. Part One.

In the recent past, I've done posts devoted to such things as Batman comics I've owned, Superman comics I've owned, horror comics I've owned and Fantastic Four comics I've owned. But, hold onto your hats, dear World because I'm not through yet.

Here's where I launch an exciting new feature; where I post comics-that-I-can't-be-bothered-to-categorise that I've owned.

Can the internet take such a strain?

Only the next few minutes will tell.

It always seemed an odd thing for me that Jack Kirby was writing and drawing a comic based on 2001. Clearly, his love of grand concepts and visual spectacle made him a good fit for the title but the glacial sterility of the film seemed massively at odds with Kirby's action-packed instincts.

Was the comic any good?

I can't really remember. But I know, from my Googlings, that it did inspire some great splash pages from him, at the very least.

I don't like to be critical of a new hero but you know you're in trouble when, by your fourth issue, you're reduced to fighting Stilt Man, a foe whose devastating super power is having extendable legs.

This cover's by Jack Kirby. At the time, I never noticed. For some reason, I was convinced that all 1970s non-Kirby mags that had Kirbyesque covers were sporting frontispieces drawn by Rich Buckler doing his Kirby thing. Oh what a fool I was.

This one came in one of those sealed triple-packs Marvel were so keen on for a while. I'm not sure what the other two comics were that came with it. Possibly an issue of The Defenders and something else.

As for this comic, I have vague memories that it involved a Mary Whitehouse type character, trying to clean up the nation. If you're a reader who's unfamiliar with Mary Whitehouse, consider yourself very lucky.

I only had two issues of Nova - this being one of them - but encountered most of his adventures in the pages of Marvel UK's Rampage and Star Wars comics. I sort of enjoyed it when it was drawn by Sal Buscema but, like a lot of others, found it more of a challenge to read when Carmine Infantino took over.

More importantly, I seem to remember having one of my school exercise books wrapped in the cover taken from a spare copy of this issue.

DC's greatest villains get together to cause mischief.

At the time, I knew little of most of DC's villains. It did seem an interesting concept though and I always wanted to get my hands on the second issue; although I assume that, being villains, they never got very far in their dreams of victory.

I have absolutely no memory of the contents of this comic. The truth is I always preferred DC's mystery and horror mags, as Marvel just seemed to use their own equivalent mags to reprint old Lee and Kirby horror tales, which were never really my cup of tea.

I recall really liking this one, though don't recall what actually happened in it. I suspect that a large part of my enjoyment of this mag came from having read DC's unhealthy-looking 1970s take on the character and finding Marvel's more robust version far more in line with my tastes.

Plus, how could you not love that Gil Kane cover?

The thing I remember most about this one is the nipples.

Yes, Reader, it's true; Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #241 was the first super-hero comic in which I ever encountered characters whose nipples protruded through their costumes. This may not sound like a big deal but, at the time, I was much impressed by such anatomical accuracy.

Other than that, the story was quite fun, with a distinctly retro vibe to the artwork - as the floating brain with eyeballs and tentacles might suggest.

There was also a Timber Wolf back-up tale that left you in no doubt he'd been remodelled to be more like Wolverine than ever before.

Nova #3. Diamondheads are forever.

"He's here!" declares the front cover, "The ultimate super-hero!"

No. It's not Superman and, sadly, the fact Nova's title only lasted twenty five issues would suggest the great comic book reading public didn't think he was the ultimate super-hero either. But what Nova was in his short run was by, all accounts, an attempt to produce a comic in the 1970s that could've been made in the 1960s.

I can see why, for comic creators, a nostalgic attempt to relive the comics of their younger days would appeal but was that ever going to mean anything to readers?

Here's what's going on. There's a villain called Diamondhead who, like many a Silver-Age villain, got his powers in an unlikely manner, this time by tripping over whilst seeking to rob a science institute, and falling into the path of its experimental laser beam. By some means unexplained, this turned him into a man made of living diamond, who therefore can't be harmed. Now, as well as wealth, he's after a box he thinks can enable him to defeat an unseen foe he refers to as the Dreaded One. From my knowledge of future issues, I'm assuming the Dreaded One was the Sphinx although I stand to be corrected.

Not that Diamondhead's blatant invulnerability to harm stops Nova from trying to harm him. Again and again our witless hero flings himself at the villain, only to find it doesn't even phase him. And still that doesn't lead him to change tack - and still he keeps flinging himself at Diamondhead. You do get the feeling from reading this issue that Nova isn't exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. Perhaps we're meant to see Nova's inability to change tactics as a sign of his inexperience as a super-hero but, really, how much experience do you need in order to know that if head butting someone is hurting your head more than his, you're going to have to try something else?

Finally Diamondhead gets bored with hurting Nova's head and teams up, at the tale's end, with a villain called the Condor who likewise wants to sort out the Dreaded One.

No one loves a comic from a simpler time more than I do, so does this attempt at retro work?

On the strength of this issue, sadly not.

It has two big problems.

One is the hero's domestic set-up's too cosy. As we all know, Marvel super-heroes tend to have troublesome home lives, usually involving the loss of at least one legal guardian and the obligatory work and women troubles. But Nova's alter-ego Richard Rider has a mother and father and a brother and lives in suburban comfort. If there are girls in Rider's life to give him grief, there're no signs of them here, meaning that pretty much his only source of personal conflict seem to come from the school bully who, in the style of an early Flash Thompson, likes to give him a hard time. That brings us on to the other problem.

He's Spider-Man.

You can't get away from it, virtually every line of dialogue Nova spouts in this comic sounds like it was written for the masked wall-crawler. It means you might as well be reading an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man with all emotional conflict removed.

The plot's also too straightforward, with no twists and turns. In fact, the one moment of intrigue comes with the claim by a person unseen that one of Richard Rider's friends has murdered someone. This is clearly meant to be a hook to make you buy future issues but just feels bizarre. I know next to nothing about the character in question but it seems obvious from what little I've seen here that he isn't a murderer.

The thing's solidly drawn as always by Sal Buscema (just how many books was he drawing for Marvel at this time?) but inked by Tom Palmer. We all know Tom Palmer's a great inker but I'm not convinced his style suits Buscema's pencils. It may sound a ridiculous thing to say but somehow it just looks too inky.

So, in the end it's a mildly diverting comic but there's really nothing that'd make you want to come back for more. I would say that's a shame but, as long as we had Spider-Man in two monthly mags, why would we ever have had a reason for mourning his imitator?