Post by MacNimon on Jul 19, 2011 17:22:22 GMT
POTA was actually the first Marvel UK title to reverse the reprint trend. It was such a huge success that they simply couldn't afford to cancel it once the reprint material had (very quickly!) ran out; series writer Doug Moench recalls regularly being asked to write short, one-issue filler stories to keep the UK title ticking over until the next batch of (US) material was avaiable for publication. In fact the UK title actually got ahead of the US one at one point, and much of the stuff published in the UK weekly was later reprinted in the US one. To stretch things even further, they even reprinted Marvel's Killraven/War Of The Worlds strip, renamed it Apeslayer and pasted Ape heads over the original Martian heads to make the material suit the title! They also made good use of material which had been edited out of the US version for reasons of space, but even so they couldn't keep it up forever...it still had a good two and a half year run though. As Doug Moench once said,"Britain just went Ape crazy!"
To expand on that a bit...although the British POTA weekly occasionally used material before its US counterpart, this wasn't a case of British content appearing in the title. That scenario was still several years in the future at that point. What happened was that, apart from letters pages, ads etc, the comic was produced over at Marvel HQ in America then shipped over here to be printed and distributed. Once the British weekly had caught up with reprint material, Marvel actually had two seperate production offices for POTA...one for the US version, and one for the UK version. Two copies of the source material were sent out at the same time, one to each office to do with as was required for their own edition. But the weekly production schedule of the British version necessitated a need for more material than the US version, hence Doug Moench having to provide extra stories etc which saw print in the UK first.
The first issue of POTA featured the first part of Marvel's adaptation of the film, with no back-up strips but a text article instead. Back-up strips from issue two onwards were (initially) Gullivar Jones, Warrior Of Mars and Ka-Zar, Lord Of The Savage Land (iirc). The Gullivar Jones series was an adaptation of a novel written in the early years of the 20th Century, and influenced Edgar Rice Burroughs in the creation of his later John Carter, Warlord of Mars series which was first published in 1912. There are certainly similarities between the two series.
To expand on that a bit...although the British POTA weekly occasionally used material before its US counterpart, this wasn't a case of British content appearing in the title. That scenario was still several years in the future at that point. What happened was that, apart from letters pages, ads etc, the comic was produced over at Marvel HQ in America then shipped over here to be printed and distributed. Once the British weekly had caught up with reprint material, Marvel actually had two seperate production offices for POTA...one for the US version, and one for the UK version. Two copies of the source material were sent out at the same time, one to each office to do with as was required for their own edition. But the weekly production schedule of the British version necessitated a need for more material than the US version, hence Doug Moench having to provide extra stories etc which saw print in the UK first.
The first issue of POTA featured the first part of Marvel's adaptation of the film, with no back-up strips but a text article instead. Back-up strips from issue two onwards were (initially) Gullivar Jones, Warrior Of Mars and Ka-Zar, Lord Of The Savage Land (iirc). The Gullivar Jones series was an adaptation of a novel written in the early years of the 20th Century, and influenced Edgar Rice Burroughs in the creation of his later John Carter, Warlord of Mars series which was first published in 1912. There are certainly similarities between the two series.
