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Underground > Comic Books >

Deadline and the UK anthology boom

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10:39 / 02.02.05

Hey, we were riffing over on this thread about how fondly we remembered Deadline magazine and its roster of creators - Hewlett and Martin, Bond, Milligan, D'Israeli, Dillon S and Dillon G, Langridge, Abadzis, Hillyer, Morris, loads more.

The very late 80s and early 90s were a boom time for comics all over, including the UK. We had quite a few mainstream newsstand anthologies, including Deadline, Blast! (with Mr Ellis' Lazarus Churchyard), Toxic!, Marvel UK's Overkill, Glasgow's Electric Soup featuring Mr Quitely's debut, the hibrow ESCAPE mag, and of course the daddy, 2000AD.

These were all available to buy in Smiths, Menzies, and your corner shop. UNREAL!

Now only 2000AD survives. Will we ever see the likes of those days again? How would such titles do these days? Let us know what you think, and share your reminiscences of UK comics anthologies, good, bad, ugly and stupid.

10:50 / 02.02.05

To be fair, 2000AD did predate the whole of the early 90's comics by over a decade - it managed to establish itself in a profoundly different market to the on that existed a decade later.

I may well be being influenced by Roger Sabin here, but I'd also argue that the 90s comics emerged largely out of the the burst of interest publishers of all stripes showed towards comics following the break out success of Maus, Watchmen and DKR... unfortunately the market was not yet ready to sustain the tremendous output of comics that followed from roughly 1988 to 1995...

On the plus side though, while many magazines might have floundered and many less than stellar strips were created, many great comics DID reach the shelves. It is only now that many of those comics are finally finding their audiences...

miss wonderstarr

11:36 / 02.02.05

There was some pretty mediocre filler in Deadline, though: I never thought much of Johnny Nemo, and Dillon wrote/drew/lettered a couple of bog-standard science fiction strips called B-Bop and Lula and... something like Shaft, or Slice, I think. All his strips involved 80s cool dudes with wraparound shades and ribbed waistcoats with rolled-up sleeves (rather like Marty Jr in Back to the Future II) running into big-boobed damsels and getting into Blade Runner-lite adventures.

The emergence of a kitchen-sink social/magic realist subgenre (like Wired World) was innovative for a while but then it seemed like everyone was doing strips about kooky cartooned street-smart sassy minxes and angsty guys (Hugo Tate). The girls seemed to lose their clothes a lot, like a "post-feminist" version of the old strip-cartoon Jane. The guys all seemed to listen to Joy Division and write diaries.

I am probably exaggerating.

PS. I gave Roger Sabin his PhD! interesting claim to fame.

11:41 / 02.02.05

All his strips involved 80s cool dudes with wraparound shades and ribbed waistcoats with rolled-up sleeves (rather like Marty Jr in Back to the Future II) running into big-boobed damsels and getting into Blade Runner-lite adventures.

But it was the Eighties! That was the height of sophistication then.

I have fond memories of this period, particularly Deadline and Crisis and stuff like Heartbreak Hotel. I recently took delivery of a lot of this old stuff when my parents decided that at the age of 35 I could finally take charge of all the crap that's been clogging up their home for the past 15 years.

A lot of it is, mediocre, true, but there were some gems. I'm re-reading and flogging on eBay at the moment.

miss wonderstarr

12:15 / 02.02.05

I'm not really complaining about that 80s-future styling; in a way I have great affection for it. I used to write and draw stuff myself in those days, set in the distant year 2000, and all the cool juve characters were dressed that way! Dillon's 2000AD rarity "Hap Hazzard" is actually a more polished and endearing example of this trend.

12:45 / 02.02.05

C'moan. We all wanted to look like Johnny Nemo and have a sexy robot sidekick. Admit it!

Haus of Mystery

13:34 / 02.02.05

Johnny Nemo was fucking brilliant. I kind of missed the point of it as a kid, preferring the outright bizarreness of Tank Girl, but re-reading it recently I found myself laughing out loud at Milligan's wry take on the hardboiled genre. Brett Ewins was at the top of his game her IMHO (alongside Bad Co. natch)
You could certainly accuse the majority of strips of aiming for 'kewlness' but it's worth remembering a) a lot of the creators were very young (Bond, Hewlett, Abadzis...) and b) it was aimed at the slightly older teen crowd, hence lots of stories about drinking & shagging. And to their credit a good deals of the strips attempted to deviate from typical protagonists - 'Wired World' for example dealt with two teenage girls in a sort-of contemporary setting. 'Beryl the Bitch' was a female take on yuppie hell, 'Nommo' was...well just fucking weird. It's easy to knoxk it for being 80's but (as already stated) it was the 80's. I wish there was an equivalent available on the news racks today.

miss wonderstarr

14:26 / 02.02.05

Johnny Nemo = Barbarella 20 years on.

15:51 / 02.02.05

I read most of these titles at the time, but when reminiscing about them the only strip that comes to mind with huge affection was Hugo Tate by Nick Abadzis, in Deadline. Specifically the America story. I liked that a lot.
Much of the stuff in the anthologies I could take or leave – which is probably the nature of the beast – and it still amuses me that Si Spencer went from editing Deadline to writing for EastEnders. But then again, Art Young from DC started it. But I digress.
Liked Deadline on the whole, and Blast was okay, but Toxic and Overkill always seemed to me to be little more than warm-ups for the collected or US versions of the strips. If memory serves, Overkill actually featured different versions of strips that were later reprinted in US format, with pages being replaced/removed as appropriate. Which must have been a devil of a thing to write, and co-ordinate. And may well have been much of the reason it was so short-lived.
I generally liked Escape – especially Bolland’s Mr Mamoulian – and at the time was following 2000AD and Crisis as well, but the cost of all these made me almost glad when Revolver, and then Crisis, folded, as I was finding them prohibitively expensive… but I probably shouldn’t really make it sound like a complaint; might be seen as a bit of a golden era for non-preteen comics in UK newsagents, I guess.

16:22 / 02.02.05

Overkill must have been a nightmare for writers and editors because it involved creating strips that could be both serialized into chunks of 7 or so pages, but also because they also had to include guest stars from Marvel US comics on pages that could be entirely excised from the UK version... Artists who shot to fame (or steady employment at least...) as a result of overkill include Gary Frank and Liam Sharp...

Haus of Mystery

16:26 / 02.02.05

Johnny Nemo = Barbarella 20 years on

And this is bad why?

16:47 / 02.02.05

I can imagine, Sleaze; I really liked the first Knights of Pendragon series (the one with the Erskine art), but thought the continuation of it in Overkill was a real let-down. Though I think that was as much because they'd switched to a more traditional superhero look to it as the idea that there were missing pages (I bought the US edition eventually too, and that wasn't my thing either).

And if memory serves, Bryan Hitch drew oodles of Marvel US characters in the 'Mys-Tech Wars' miniseries as well. Might have been amongst his first bits of pro work ? Don't know enough about it to say.
Though I think that was published in the US anyway, so that might be cheating.

Haus of Mystery

16:56 / 02.02.05

I never forgave Marvel UK for what they did to Death's Head (and all the subsequent shitty rip-offs they flooded the market with). Overkill never got me interested, firmly entrenched as I was in 2000AD-land. Read the first issue, hated it. You're right about the first 'Knights of Pendragon' series, it had loads of good ideas if not quite the execution, but the second wave of titles was balls.

17:17 / 02.02.05

I'm also up there with the Knights of Pendragon Vol 1 love - one of the last good comics that Dan Abnett ever (co-)wrote.

Bryan Hitch, like Steve Dillon before him, got into illustrating comics during his teenage years... I'm not sure what his first comics work was but he was doing stuff for Transformers UK in 1987.

Haus of Mystery

18:01 / 02.02.05

Bastard's never had a job outside the comc industry! I think his first work was definitely Transformers - he did a passable Geoff senior rip-off (just like he did a passable Alan Davis rip-off years later), and he did most of the first Death's head series, yes?

Apparently Marvel UK funded 'Death's Head', Dragon's Claws' and 'Sleeze Brothers' (weird Blues Brothers SF parody -hit and miss IMHO) on the back of the outrageous success of the 'Transformers UK' comic - pretty wild for what started off as a reprint toy franchise comic!

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

20:31 / 02.02.05

Crisis was ace because it had New Statesmen, and later, Bible John.
Revolver not only had Rogan Gosh, it had Dare as well.
A LOT of the output at the time was bollocks... let's remember the good things. Considering that at the time, the majority of UK big press comics consisted of Pat Mills infodumps... it was cool that while people like Morrison and Milligan got to do their showboating (which, in the cited cases, was ACE), Abadzis et al had a platform for their decidedly UNcommercial comics.
I miss the days when there were whole mags full of cool comic stuff that you could buy IN YOUR LOCAL NEWSAGENT.

20:35 / 02.02.05

I miss the days when there were whole mags full of cool comic stuff that you could buy IN YOUR LOCAL NEWSAGENT.

My sentiments exactly. It hardly seems believable nowadays

Haus of Mystery

21:30 / 02.02.05

A LOT of the output at the time was bollocks... let's remember the good things.

Amen.

21:36 / 02.02.05

And sadly the debacle of Tank Girl the Movie took Deadline from us at just the time the lads mag market was taking off - if it could have held on another 6 months I figure it coulf have carved out a niche for itself in the new market that would have kept it on the shelves to this very day...

Death's Head - ah yes- from the looks of the artwork on High noon, Tex Hitch was the first person to draw Death's head - he went on to draw 5 out of the 10 issues and I'm prepared to stand up for the 4 issue limited series DHII for being not entirely bad... it just went massively downhill after that... For the curious issue 54 of What If... provided Simon Furman and Geoff Senior with a chance to undo all of the DHII nonsense...

23:47 / 02.02.05

Although I'd read 2000AD as a kid, it was picking up REVOLVER at Menzies in the Bus Station in Inverness that switched me on to comics. As as been said, unbelievable now, but Rogan Josh, Purple Days (a Jimi Hendrix biography I would think thrice about reading now), Bible John ( an early morrison which was like a brief Glaswegian FROM HELL), mixed with Shakey Kane and Philip Bond wierdness... When I was 15 it blew my mind.

I started to get Crisis shortly after that, and all the others. TOXIC! sticks in my mind for ACCIDENT man, and the fact it seemed to be struggling from the day it began. But I bought all of these titles every week/month/fortnight.

There were also mags which reprinted DARK HORSE stuff like ALIENS and PREDATOR in a serialised format, but none of them lasted longer than a year I believe. I remember passing around the first issue of ALIENS on the bus during a school trip to Belgium, and eventually getting back the tattered rag which I still own as proof that it actually was published. But as a kid, I never doubted that it would stop, despite the increasing pauses between each issue.

I still have every issue of REVOLVER, TOXIC!, BLAST and most of CRISIS, particularly after they went monthly. Is that shit worth anything?

23:50 / 02.02.05

And having recently delved into it, BIBLE JOHN's really good. Reprint?

07:25 / 03.02.05

I seem to recall that Aliens mag did commission some original Brit content as well - I remember getting excited about a Peter Milligan penned story, also they originated a rather super Gibbons / Mignola story, neither of whose titles I remember

07:35 / 03.02.05

Ah yes the brief spell when Dark Horse had a presence in the UK newstand market... I only bought a couple of issues of the UK aliens comic so I didn't see any of the original material, but the issue I did pick up prompted me to buy the collection of Aliens: Hive which I still rate.

07:42 / 03.02.05

I still have every issue of REVOLVER, TOXIC!, BLAST and most of CRISIS, particularly after they went monthly. Is that shit worth anything?

Yup. People will pay reasonably well for Crisis and Revolver. One bloke even bought my lot of Blast on ebay and then told me to keep them and just send a scan of a JG Ballard interview that he needed. Toxic don't sell, though.

09:02 / 03.02.05

And having recently delved into it, BIBLE JOHN's really good. Reprint?

Does Rebellion own all of the Crisis and Revolver back catalogue, or was it creator owned?

09:40 / 03.02.05

If memory serves, Bible John and the New Adventures of Hitler were creator-owned... I seem to recall the copyright notices saying Snobbery with Violence, but I could well be wrong.

09:45 / 03.02.05

AFAIK it remains far from certain what exactly from 2000AD's back catalogue Rebellion owns - thus areas of contention such as the ongoing dispute between Rebellion and Grant Morrison over who owns Zenith...

When Crisis came out both it and 2000AD were owned by Fleetway, if memory serves - if the Crisis back catalogue was subsequertly purchased by Egmont and then purchsed by rebellion as was 2000AD remains an open question - I'd say probably not...

Dan Fish - @Fish1k

10:00 / 03.02.05

I remember Toxic as having some great stuff (Marshal Law, Accident Man, Sex Warrior, The Missionary, etc) but suffered from not following through some of the stories. IIRC, they were all creator owned, it seems that some of the creators must have got distracted and failed to complete stuff. I'm still annoyed at the sudden demise of McMahon's Muto Maniac around #7 (the following issue had a MM cover, but no strip!)

I was surprised on a recent flick-through that guys like Mike Carey had early stuff in there.

I never really read Deadline, as money was tight, and I was too young to appreciate the music they covered. I didn't realise how much comic the mag actually contained until recently. I loved the follow-up Tank Girl series though. I remember running around looking for a newsagent to pick up the first issue, on the morning of my Cousins wedding, my Aunt becoming unnecessarily frantic at my disappearance.

That must have been a pretty formative time in my life, because it seems like a long period, but must have been less than a year.

11:58 / 03.02.05

Both Accident Man and Sex Warrior were reprinted by Dark Horse - as was Marshall Law (though I forget who collected that)....

Dan Fish - @Fish1k

13:41 / 03.02.05

I bought two issues of DH Sex Warrior, they were follow-ups rather than reprints with Mike McKone(?) replacing Will Simpson. Likewise, the marvelous Brats Bizarre (By Mills/Mighten) was a continuation (the appeal of which was diminished after Duke's art finished halfway through)

Were there reprints too, or was the 'Accident Man' series new stuff?

Another unfinished series, Road To Hell, by McDuffie/MacNeil, is 'Coming Soon', but from scratch with a new art team.

13:41 / 03.02.05

Not quite sure what happened with Sex Warrior and Accident Man (neither of which really did it for me anyway), though I think that Apocalypse (Toxic’s publisher?) printed Marshal Law: Kingdom of the Blind in both magazine-sized and US-prestige format, and then Dark Horse printed The Hateful Dead… and after that I think Marshal Law was pretty much at Dark Horse in general, though it’s bounced around a bit – CoolBeansWorld and the like, even. Working purely from memory here, though, so I’m very much open to correction.

13:54 / 03.02.05

That'll teach me to assume... I never read Toxic so figured the Sex Warrior and Accident man comics published by DH reprinted and completed the original stories... looks like I was wrong...

16:04 / 03.02.05

I also seem to remember a couple of good DC reprint comics, Shockwave or something, that had Morrison's Animal Man and his Hellblazer story along with Gaiman's Black Orchid. Also some Swamp Thing.

19:08 / 03.02.05

PS. I gave Roger Sabin his PhD! interesting claim to fame.

Would that be the same Roger Sabin who Wrote Adult Comics.
Cool I used a lot of that on my final year project at Uni.

Can't believe no-one has yet to mention Marvel UK's Strip the original UK anthology comic. It had a mix of UK (the original Marshal Law series), American and mainly European comic stories in there and ran for 20 issues (which I still have, somewhere).

But Deadline was the king. Still remember reading my first issue of that title in my six form common room. Had found it in the local village's newsagents and was just blown away.

Mainly by Shaky Kane's A-Men artwork.

20:23 / 03.02.05

Ahh Shaky Kane aka Shaky 2000. Whatever happened to him. He was OUT THERE!

And Judge Planet with Peter Milligan. The. Weirdest. Judge. Dredd. Story. Ever.

A-Men

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