Thursday 10 June 2021

From Cents to Pence! latest + can you help #1

I'd forgotten just how much work was involved in compiling the original indices to Marvel's published UK output when the time came to revisit and update from 2000, where it had been left when writing on the history kicked in. I won't bore you with some of the stylistic changes needed for consistency - but I had a lot of fresh material to add that involved a lot of typing but provided the chance to fill in some annoying blanks.

Thanks to the input of various kind souls across the internet, in addition to the info on The Real Ghostbusters I'd secured last year, I now have full title info on Galaxy Rangers and Captain Planet, plus a few other oddities that I didn't buy at the time. As well as making a discovery about the ongoing Spider-Man magazine - for several years it's been running tranches of exclusive material, also published in Panini's European editions.

The good news is that I've almost finished with this - bar some intensive proofing - so I can soon return to the final task, finishing up the final chapters of the book detailing the Panini era.

With that overdue update out of the way, I'm hoping someone out there maybe able to help with the first of several searches I've fallen short on. These won't affect completion of the book - if I can resolve them then they'll be one of several holdovers for any subsequent updated edition. One of the things I've been looking at in recent years are the various foreign strips published in the UK - in the past week I seem to have resolved almost all of them once I'd deciphered a specialist website devoted to Tintin magazine (yes, they ran quite a few things from out of its pages in the mid-1980s), but not quite everything.

Here's one to get you thinking: Betty Boop - courtesy of a one-off Valentine's Day Special and various editions of The Marvel Bumper Comic. In the attached gallery below I've now been tipped off that the strip (images 1) probably came from a four issues series published by Gevion, but in which issue did it appear? I've also included the only Sunday page whose date is missing (all the others published were from 1985)? Good hunting!

Another search request and update will follow shortly.



Rob

2 comments:

  1. Andrewpwild1@yahoo.co.uk10 June 2021 at 14:01

    I have the pretty much the full set from 1972 to around 1983. I've published several books. Happy to help in any way.

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  2. Hi Andrew,
    Thanks for the offer! My own 'working' collection comprises 1972-2021, taking in all the UK/US series, Annuals and Specials - it's the only the younger reader titles that I don't have sets from. But, as I've said before, back then I didn't know that I was ever going to be doing a book, so why would I have bought them all (never mind all the extra storage space required)! If you have issues up to 1983, then there is one series I don't have a full run of - Kim. I wasn't aware that it was running reprints of US romance strips, otherwise I would have picked it up at the time. What books have you had published, by the way?

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