During the 1950s and 1960s a number of UK companies including Alan Class Comics and Odhams Press licensed the rights to reprint first Atlas and later Marvel Comics American-originated material, while companies such as World Distributors held separate licenses to reprint US Marvel comics reformatted for the British annuals market. Their success prompted Marvel to start up their own UK branch, Marvel UK, in 1972 to cut out the middlemen and directly reprint American strips.
Like most other UK comics, Marvel UK’s titles were black and white weekly anthologies, reprinting several US strips in installments; in order to split up American comics which were between 18 and 22 pages in length into 2 to 5 page segments while still making sense and ending each week on suitable high points, panels and text were frequently rearranged or removed altogether, and it was not uncommon for new splash pages to be drawn by UK artists to properly recap the start of each segment. The first comic was Mighty World of Marvel, reprinting the Hulk, Spider-Man and Fantastic Four, but early in 1973 Spider-Man was split off into his own title, Spider-Man Comics Weekly, which would prove the most enduring of all Marvel UK’s titles, lasting until 1985 and issue #666, undertaking through a variety of title variations and merging with several less successful titles during its run. Several other titles were soon launched, including Avengers, Planet of the Apes, Dracula Lives!, The Super-Heroes, Savage Sword of Conan and The Titans, and though most were short lived, failing titles were inevitably replaced by new ones.
Perhaps not as famous as the American Marvel Comics, Marvel UK did make a large footprint in history by creating characters that are still used to this day.
Famous comic book characters such as Captain Britain, Psylocke, Meggan, the Technet team, the Fury and Courtney Ross all first appeared in Marvel UK comics before they made their American debut. Also prominent writers and artists such as Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Gary Frank and Mark Miller had some of their earliest work published by Marvel UK before breaking into the US market.
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British Comics 