Power Comics
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Power Comics was an imprint of British comics publisher Odhams Press that was particularly notable for its use of material reprinted from American Marvel Comics. Appearing chiefly during the years 1967 and 1968, the Power Comics line consisted of five weekly titles: Wham!, Smash!, Pow!, Fantastic and Terrific. The first three of these titles were essentially traditional Beano-style British comic papers supplemented by a small amount of Marvel material, while the last two were more magazine-like in style and were dominated by their Marvel content.
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[edit] History
When Odhams obtained the rights to reprint Marvel material in the UK, they started by incorporating superhero stories such as The Fantastic Four into their existing titles Wham! and Smash!. This Marvel material was reproduced in black and white, and serialized in short instalments alongside the original British strips which still dominated the content of these comics.
Power Comics took more concrete form with the appearance of Pow! and Fantastic early in 1967. 'The first issue of Pow! appeared on 14th January 1967, by which time Wham! had reached issue 136 and Smash! was at issue 51. Pow! was similar in format to the two earlier comics, with a mixture of traditional British material and Marvel reprints — in this case Spider-Man and Nick Fury.
Fantastic first appeared on 11 February 1967, and was quite different in style from its predecessors. In many ways it looked more like one of the American black-and-white anthology magazines of the time such as Creepy and Eerie than a traditional British comic like The Beano. It appeared to be aimed at an older audience than the latter, though a younger one than the American magazines. The contents of Fantastic was dominated by Marvel superheroes such as The Mighty Thor, the X-Men and Iron Man, with only a minimal amount of original British material. In general appearance, style and content, Fantastic can be considered a direct precursor of the Marvel UK weeklies such as The Mighty World Of Marvel that appeared during the 1970s.
The number of Power Comics titles was brought to five on 8 April 1967 with the first appearance of Terrific, which was similar in format to Fantastic and was again dominated by Marvel reprint material such as The Avengers, (Doctor Strange) and the Sub-Mariner.
The Power Comics line remained at five titles for nine months, after which it started to dwindle. Wham! was merged into Pow! on 13 January 1968, while Terrific merged into Fantastic three weeks later. This left three Power titles for just over six months, after which Pow! and Fantastic were merged into Smash! in September and November 1968 respectively. Smash! continued to reprint small quantities of Marvel material for a few more months, but early in 1969 Odhams was taken over by IPC Media and Power Comics ceased to exist.
[edit] Style and content
Power Comics was the first attempt to integrate elements of American superhero comics into mainstream British comic publishing, motivated by the huge success of Stan Lee's line of Marvel Comics in the USA. Besides reprinting many of Marvel's most popular series such as Spider-Man and the X-Men, there was also an attempt to fill out the "Power universe" with a home-grown British superhero called Johnny Future who appeared in Fantastic prior to its merger with Terrific.
As well as drawing heavily on Stan Lee's creative output, Power Comics also attempted to emulate Lee's chatty style and community building efforts through their own editors known as Alf and Bart. Each title had its own letter column (such as "Fantastic Fan-mail"), but also a half-page editorial ("News from the Floor of 64", a reference to the editorial offices at 64 Long Acre in London) that was common to all Power Comics and comparable in style and purpose to Marvel's Bullpen Bulletins.
Unlike the otherwise similar Marvel UK reprints of the 1970s, the Marvel material in Power Comics was edited quite heavily to replace American spellings and slang with their British equivalents. Dialogue and/or images were also changed occasionally to rectify continuity problems caused by the lack of synchronisation between reprints of different storylines.
One of the more controversial aspects of Power Comics was the almost complete lack of credit given to Marvel Comics and the American creators of the material used. Apart from the statutory copyright acknowledgement in small print, the name "Marvel" was never mentioned — wherever it appeared in the originals it was changed to "Power". The impression was given (though not explicitly stated) that the stories were the work of Alf and Bart, and the Marvel credit panels containing the names of Stan Lee and collaborators such as Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby were airbrushed out.
[edit] Trivia
A distinctive feature of both Fantastic and Terrific was the full-colour pin-up that appeared on the back cover of most issues. Many of these were reprinted from American Marvel comics, but at least some (including a Johnny Future pin-up) were produced especially for Power Comics by a young Barry Windsor-Smith.
