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Captain Storm
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Post by Captain Storm »

The proprietor of this website is having a really hard time what with being threatened with legal action by the Dark Lord(lives in Central Europe I think)Egmont,but even though no updates have been forthcoming,to date Issue 1 and 15,I think the Summer Special and other strips are still online to be viewed.So go there now before they're gone for good! :twisted:

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Sidnny
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Post by Sidnny »

I got all 15 issues when they came out and I loved them.

It was a pity it never continued. IMHO, it could have been a second 2000AD.

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SID
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Post by SID »

It took me a couple of minutes to realise that this thread is about Scream! - a comic of great potential cut short by PC idiots.

So a question then: Do you think Scream! had what it takes to survive like it's sister publication, 2000AD?
Reading comics since 1970. My Current Regulars are: 2000 AD (1977-), Judge Dredd Megazine (1990-), Spaceship Away (2003-), Commando (2013-), Monster Fun (2022-), Deadpool and Wolverine (2023-), Quantum (2023-).

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Digifiend
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Post by Digifiend »

Eh? Aren't you replying to yourself (in which case, why the bump)? Similar names, similar avatars, I assume you lost your password and re-registered?

Shiner
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Post by Shiner »

The thing about Scream that I have never understood is what exactly was the problem with the content. Was it really banned? Like some IPC comics that year it suffered from strike action and I wonder whether it stopped simply because sales were disappointing? Personally I never rated it as being anywhere near as good as 2000AD.... but I respect it has its following and I was probably too old for it by then.

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philcom55
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Post by philcom55 »

I think it was a combination of strike action and unspectacular sales rather than public outrage that killed off Scream. In my opinion the 30 issues that did appear showed a certain amount of promise that could have led to great things if it'd been given longer. Even 2000AD was still finding its feet at a similar point in its development.

- Phil R.

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starscape
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Post by starscape »

Are you mixing up Scream and Action? The latter was the one that was banned, i.e. a printed issue withdrawn after featuring on TV and the newspapers for the content, i.e. a 'youth' kicking a policeman's head in and instructions on how to make a Molotov cocktail in Kids Rule OK!

Basically it was '18' films on paper and sold to 10 year olds. Great idea!
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Shiner
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Post by Shiner »

Action was voluntarily withdrawn by IPC but I've picked up recently that sales of Scream on eBay have referred to that title as being banned. I'm not sure they're right though.

Incidently, another Action fact is that the pulped edition of Action had the word Suicide three times on its cover.

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Post by Lew Stringer »

SID wrote: So a question then: Do you think Scream! had what it takes to survive like it's sister publication, 2000AD?
Evidently not, or it would have resumed after the strike halted its production.
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philcom55
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Post by philcom55 »

Having just watched the last-ever episode of the BBC's excellent 'Being Human' I can't help feeling that the British market ought to have been able to support a proper, home-grown 'horror comic' if it had been nurtured properly. With the possible exception of Dez Skinn's House of Hammer I don't think the main UK publishers ever really overcame the stigma that had attached itself to that term during the 1950s - in spite of the fact that imported American horror comics continued to sell pretty well once they became available again. Of course there were plenty of British tales with a general supernatural theme - particularly in the girls' comics - but these tended to be the sort of material that appeared in code-approved comic books such as House of Mystery or House of Secrets rather than the sheer, visceral horror of The Haunt of Fear or Tales from the Crypt. Oddly enough Fleetway's only other full-blooded dalliance with the genre apart from Scream occurred in the pages of another strike-hit title: the equally short-lived Top Spot which featured some memorable adaptations of authors such as Poe and Stevenson that would have been entirely at home in Creepy or Eerie.

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Last edited by philcom55 on 11 Mar 2013, 01:35, edited 1 time in total.

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SID
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Post by SID »

Digifiend wrote:Eh? Aren't you replying to yourself (in which case, why the bump)? Similar names, similar avatars, I assume you lost your password and re-registered?
Nope. Changed to SID when I found it was available.
Reading comics since 1970. My Current Regulars are: 2000 AD (1977-), Judge Dredd Megazine (1990-), Spaceship Away (2003-), Commando (2013-), Monster Fun (2022-), Deadpool and Wolverine (2023-), Quantum (2023-).

Lew Stringer
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Post by Lew Stringer »

philcom55 wrote:Having just watched the last-ever episode of the BBC's excellent 'Being Human' I can't help feeling that the British market ought to have been able to support a proper, home-grown 'horror comic' if it had been nurtured properly.
I agree, Phil. Kids have always loved ghosts, monsters, etc. Look how popular Halloween merchandise is now, for one example.

I think you're right about the stigma of 'horror comics' still being around today. I believe that's why Scream! had 'Not for the nervous' on its covers, - IPC playing it safe.

It'd be difficult to get a proper horror comic on the shelves of High Street shops today without making it 'Mature Readers Only', - and even then there'd be resistance. Britain is far more conservative in some ways now than it was in the 1970s when House of Hammer was published. HoH was part of a horror trend back then of course. There was Monster Mag (with gory poster sized images) and Kev O'Neill's Legend Horror Classics, and paperbacks such as The Pan Book of Horror Stories, The Exorcist and The Rats available in newsagents, along with the imported Warren and Marvel black and white horror comics.

Completely different to the type of comics in newsagents today, so there'd be less tolerance for a horror comic I think.
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philcom55
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Post by philcom55 »

Of course, what seems to have happened is that all those British writers and artists with a talent for horror looked overseas to America instead. In fact, one can't help feeling that Vertigo would never have got off the ground without Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, Delano and Ridgeway's Hellblazer, Gaiman's Sandman, etc. It really is a shame that the nation which gave the world Frankenstein, Dracula and Mr. Hyde (not to mention Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing) should have found itself so creatively hamstrung by the legacy of 1950s paranoia when it came to comics.

To my mind it's in this context (rather than the use of Reveille-style soft-core 'glamour') that the failure of Top Spot stands as something of a tragedy for the long-term development of comics in the UK. In many ways Fleetway's brave but abortive attempt to nurture a readership of late-teenage boys in 1958/9 had a lot in common with EC's Mad and James Warren's Creepy - so much so, in fact, that I can't help wondering what might have happened if Top Spot had been converted into a similar magazine format instead of being ignominiously merged with Film Fun in 1960.

For anybody who's unfamiliar with the more 'adult' material that Top Spot carried here's one of my personal favourites: an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's first published story 'Metzengerstein'.

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- Though the fantastically expressionistic (and suitably over-the-top 'gothic') artwork is uncredited I'm pretty sure this was drawn by the astonishingly versatile Philip Mendoza, who also contributed a series of grisly cartoons under the heading of 'Old Mendoza's Horror-Scope'. One imagines that assignments such as these would have provided a welcome change of pace from 'Katie Country Mouse'!

- Phil Rushton

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Post by felneymike »

Mind you, Max the killer computer from Scream became "editor" of Eagle for several years, as well as appearing in an ongoing story there.

Death Wish was pretty grim at times too, didn't that start in the (kind of) motor racing-themed Speed?

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SID
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Post by SID »

Yes. Death Wish did indeed start out in Speed.
Reading comics since 1970. My Current Regulars are: 2000 AD (1977-), Judge Dredd Megazine (1990-), Spaceship Away (2003-), Commando (2013-), Monster Fun (2022-), Deadpool and Wolverine (2023-), Quantum (2023-).

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