British Comics - Reprint Market

Reprint Market

The comics reading public in the UK 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. Thorpe & Porter published many black & white reprints of American comics in the 1950s. Thorpe & Porter/Stratos published a long-running Marvel series, Kid Colt Outlaw, which contained black-and-white reprints from both Atlas and DC. They also published Two-Gun Kid and Rawhide Kid in a smaller black-and-white format, though these were usually the entire contents of various American issues reprinted.

When Captain Marvel ceased publication in the United States because of a lawsuit, the British reprint company, L. Miller & Son, 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 in Warrior. L. Miller also reprinted many other American series including the early 1950s Eerie and Black Magic in black and white format. These usually contain the American stories which relate to the cover but also contain other additional gems toward the back of the comic to fill-up the 64 pages.

Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, a 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.

The reprint market really took off in the 1980s with Titan Books releasing collections of British material, as well as signing deals with DC Comics to release American comic books in the UK. Igor Goldkind was Titan's, and Forbidden Planet's, marketing consultant at the time and helped popularise the term "graphic novel" for the softcover trade paperbacks they were releasing, which generated a lot of attention from the mainstream press.

As well as Marvel UK reprints, Panini Comics reprint many of Marvel's titles. These include 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 letters page on the inside back cover. Titles printed include many Marvel comics, including Astonishing Spider-Man, Essential X-Men and Mighty World of Marvel which reprints a variety of Marvel Comics. They also printed 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), though currently this title is published by Titan Magazines

Since 2005, a small selection of American translations of the most popular Japanese comics have been reprinted in the UK by major publishers such as Random House, through their Tanoshimi imprint, and the Orion Publishing Group. Both no longer publish Japanese comics in British versions, for Orion, the reprints they were handling have been switched to having the original American versions imported, however all Japanese comic publishings by Random House were abandoned in early 2009. Simultaneously, the very small press Fanfare has published a few UK-exclusive English-language editions of alternative Japanese manga and French bande dessinée, both sublicenced from the Spanish publisher Ponent Mon.