History of the British comic: Encyclopedia II - History of the British comic - The Reprint Market

History of the British comic - The Reprint Market

The comics reading public in Britain were not always able to get reliable supplies of American comic books and yet have always enjoyed the different approach to comics writing from the other side of the Atlantic. So the lack of reliable supplies was supplemented by a variety of black and white reprints of Marvel's 1950s monster comics, Fawcett's Captain Marvel, and some other characters such as Sheena, Mandrake the Magician, The Phantom etc. Several reprint companies were involved in repackaging American material for the British market, notably the importer and distributor Thorpe & Porter.

Thorpe & Porter published similar formatted titles under various names. They were also re-publishing Dell's Four Color series and Classics Illustrated in the UK. Their material also included some work never before published in the US. They were eventually purchased by DC Comics, via their distributing arm, then known as IND., in 1964, going on to publish an official Superman/Batman reprint book, DC Special.

Alan Class is another notable name in this market, his company Alan Class & Co. Ltd purchasing L. Miller & Son's holdings in the early 1960s and continuing to produce black & white reprints until the late 1980s.

When Captain Marvel ceased publication in the United States because of a lawsuit the British reprint company, L. Miller & Son, just copied the entire Captain Marvel idea in every detail and began publishing their own knock-off under the names Marvelman and Young Marvelman, taking advantage of different copyright laws. These clone versions continued for a few years and, as seen above, were revived years later Warrior.

An oddity of the trans-atlantic comics trade is Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. This female version of Tarzan (with an element of H. Rider Haggard's "She who must be obeyed" - She... Na!) was licensed from Will Eisner's Eisner-Iger studio for a British and Australasian tabloid, Wags in 1937. The success of this character led to the WAGS artwork being repackaged for publication by Fiction House magazines in the United States, thus exporting the character back to her country of origin.

Currently Panini Comics reprint many modern American comics. They reprint Marvel's Ultimate Spider-Man (originally holding two issues of either Ultimate Spider-Man or Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, now existing as a double feature with Ultimate X-Men) and also produce a Collector's Edition line of comics, featuring a cardboard cover, three stories and a letter's page on the inside cover. Titles printed include many Marvel comics, for example The Mighty World of Marvel Starring Daredevil and The Incredible Hulk (contaning, for example, a Daredevil comic, an Incredible Hulk comic and a Captain Britain comic), and one DC comic (Batman Legends, reprinting various Batman adventures e.g. two parts of a multi-title crossover and an issue of Batman: Year One).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The Reprint Market", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki