Okay, let's get this properly started, shall we? I'm a comics nut. I'm not too proud to admit to it. I'm under Marvel's thumb and I know it. I’m not getting that monkey off my back any time soon.
Like many people who have read comics for a long time I sometimes get that Armchair Editor feeling at the back of my mind. The belief that on some level I could do this myself, playing through some kind of fantasy bullpen in my head. I read books and think to myself, "If only they'd used Artist X with writer Y, here," or, "If only they'd had to guts to end it THAT way, that’s what I would have done!"
Throughout my childhood, and in particular in the early 90s, I read Marvel comics' Marvel UK imprint ardently. When the imprint took off I was amazingly happy that, finally, somebody was going to write some books set in (or at least directly associated with) the Britain that I lived in, day to day. To represent a more realistic take on this country, as opposed to the stereotypes and caricatures of Britain that we so frequently saw in US market comics.
Sure, up to this point we had had some noble attempts - notably Alan Moore and Jamie Delano's Captain Britain runs, and Chris Claremont and Alan Davis Excalibur - but this was going to be a mass explosion of ongoing British characters. Death's Head, Dark Angel, Motormouth & Killpower - from early impressions I loved this stuff! Marvel UK EiC Paul Neary had brought together a pool of sound Comic Book talents, many of whom remain in the US market today. Writers like Dan Abnett, Artists like Salvador Larocca, Jimmy Cheung, and Carlos Pacheco...
And then, after just over 2 years (and a serious amount of material) Marvel's head office pulled the plug on Marvel UK. It was a bad time for the comic book industry. A massive crash from a collapsing collector boom and Marvel UK was a casualty, just as they were in the process of launching a whole new range of more mature, artistically and creatively interesting titles.
Some saw the light of day, in the last few months of the imprint. Some (Like Alan Davis' ClanDestine) were eventually published through Marvel US. Unfortunately though, many titles were never finished, left half-completed or never actually made it beyond the planning phase.
It's a great shame, as from reading some of the concepts and seeing the brief glimpses of cancelled projects in the years since then? What Marvel UK were trying to do was arguably a few years ahead of its time. More in-step with DC’s Vertigo imprint than the rest of Marvel’s line. Genuinely interesting stuff.
Most of the artists and writers unearthed by the imprint period, from Britain and across Europe, were fortunate enough to be given further work by Marvel, who fitted them onto some of their mainstream books. But this was still the mid-90s and Marvel's general look of the time was very much trying to match the exaggerated aesthetic of early Image Comics. Big guns a plenty and massive muscles. Make it look like Jim Lee, but not in a way you’ll get sued. Oh, and it still needs to basically be inks with very simple colours. Marvel had started to use airbrushing but it was still early days.
While many Marvel UK artists could absolutely deliver on that? Not everybody could fit neatly into that shape.
A fine example of that is artist Mark Harrison.
Harrison did a lot of the cover work for Marvel UK's Overkill anthology. He works primarily in oils, and he's also really bloody good at it.
I came across this a while back:
This is a link to the Loose Cannons limited series that Harrison was illustrating for Marvel UK at the time of its demise. I remember it because it was heavily advertised in other Marvel UK titles at the time. It was also a bold example of some of what Marvel UK's new approach was trying to achieve. A four issue series which was entirely painted rather than inked. It was something special, and I had planned to grab it when it was released.
Sadly, it never was.
When you look at what Marvel US have done recently, with projects such as last year's Garth Ennis penned Ghost Rider limited series, the concept of producing books painted in oils is now one that they are more willing to embrace, but back then? It seems that they weren't willing to take the gamble. Absolutely not the end for Harrison, thankfully. 2000 AD were more than happy to give him more work, and his revamp of Durham Red were very highly rated.
Harrison later tried to persuade 2000 AD to print Loose Cannons, with him finishing the material from the final issue, but with so many Marvel owned characters involved? This didn’t happen. Thankfully for the rest of us he's posted it up online, and any fans of Marvel UK's characters will want to take a look at this. Admittedly it's largely a spin-off from their Warheads series, but features a large number of characters from other books, rendered in oils in a way you wont have seen them before. Especially Death's Head.
Just think of what could/should have been...
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