Comics UK

looking through the Whams I picked up a few weeks back I saw some nice ads for the beginnings of three Power titles - thought i'd share them with you. I'm lucky to be old enough to remember getting the first Fantastic and sticking the scar on my wrist in the school playground. Wonderful days.

Cheers for the post, Steve. Brought back fond memories. I have a home movie featuring a clip of me on holiday in '67, proudly wearing my Iron Man iron-on transfer (from Terrific) which my mum had carefully applied to a white t-shirt.

"Swingiest zingiest"???

Hard to believe that someone at Odhams was paid to systematically alter all the americanisms in the Marvel strips before they could be seen by a British audience!

- Phil Rushton

The Fantastic ads refer to a Mid-Atlantic Accent - sounds like an explaination for those Americanisms. I'm not sure they altered them. We'd need to see the UK and US versions side by side to be sure.

Digifiend wrote:The Fantastic ads refer to a Mid-Atlantic Accent - sounds like an explaination for those Americanisms. I'm not sure they altered them. We'd need to see the UK and US versions side by side to be sure.

Yes they did alter a lot of Americanisms in the UK reprints. "Gonna" became "going to", "New York" became "the city", and if Ben Grimm referred to an American comedian it'd be changed to a UK reference etc. It's not like they wanted to pretend it was England, just that they didn't want Americanisms to alienate the readers.

The changes were usually quite obvious because the lettering wouldn't match.

It was quite pointless though. As kids we knew the strips were set in America because the environment and fashions looked just like those we saw on American tv shows, and in the letters pages of Fantastic etc they never denied those strips were American in origin. Also, the original Marvel comics were in newsagents and the whole appeal of those comics was because they were so different from our culture. (British and American culture is so similar these days but back in the Sixties, American comics and tv shows seemed like they were from a distant and exciting world far removed from our own.)

Lew