Power Comics
Power Comics was an imprint of the 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 The Beano-style British comics papers, supplemented by a small amount of Marvel and DC Comics material, while Fantastic and Terrific were more magazine-like in style and were dominated by their Marvel superhero content.
History
The Power Comics imprint was part of Odhams, headquartered at 64 Long Acre, London. Odhams was owned by International Publishing Corporation, a company formed in 1963 by Cecil Harmsworth King, chairman of the Daily Mirror and Sunday Pictorial, through a series of corporate mergers. All of the comics published by IPC were under the control of one or other of the subsidiary companies which King had brought together to form IPC, including Fleetway Publications and Odhams Press.The Power Comics imprint was led by a three-man editorial team, known as Alf, Bart, and Cos. Alfred Wallace was the Managing Editor at Odhams, and supervised the entire Power Comics line. Under his direction, Bart and Cos were the staff editors who handled the individual titles.
Following the initial success of Wham! in 1964, Odhams had launched four more Power Comics during 1966 and 1967, only to close them in quick succession. Whereas 1968 began with all five Power Comics titles apparently flourishing, by the year's end only Smash! was still being published, the otrhers having been merged into it one by one. Readers had to notice that something was wrong, as the series of mergers resulted in ever more ludicrous titles, culminating in Smash! and Pow! Incorporating Fantastic.
Origins: ''Wham!'' and ''Smash!''
When Odhams obtained the rights to reprint Marvel Comics material in the UK, they began by incorporating superhero stories such as the Hulk and the Fantastic Four into their existing titles Smash! and Wham! respectively. The Marvel material was reproduced in black-and-white and serialised in short installments alongside the original British strips which still dominated the content of those comics. Smash! also reprinted the Batman newspaper strip, to cash in on the popularity of the live-action TV show.The Power Comics logo first appeared on Smash! #44, with a publication date of 3 December 1966.
''Pow!'', ''Fantastic'', and ''Terrific''
Power Comics took more concrete form with the appearance of Pow! and Fantastic early in 1967. The first issue of Pow! appeared on 14 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, 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 such as The Beano. It was aimed at an older audience than the latter, though a younger one than the American anthology magazines. The content of Fantastic was dominated by the Marvel Comics superheroes Thor, the X-Men, and Iron Man, with only a minimal amount of 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 first appeared a few years later in 1972.
The number of Power Comics titles was increased 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: The Avengers, Doctor Strange, and the Sub-Mariner.
Mergers and the end of Power Comics
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.Odhams' parent, IPC Magazines, was eager to shed the licensing fee expenses for their American reprints, so as each title in the Power Comics line shut down, its respective superhero strips were given up. Only in the case of Fantastic, where the existing contract with Marvel had some months to run, were those strips transferred to its replacement, the merged Smash! and Pow! Incorporating Fantastic.
Despite being the longest survivor, and inheriting many popular strips from the other four titles, Smash! was only a limited success. The Power Comics line officially came to an end in November 1968, when the logo was dropped from Smash! and Pow!
Smash! continued to include some Marvel material but, once the Marvel contract expired in March 1969, IPC quickly made extensive changes to the title, firing Alf Wallace and ending many other strips as well. By introducing a new cover feature, new strips, and free gifts, Smash! was revamped in all but name into a new comic.
Despite more editorial shakeups, Smash!, the last surviving member of the Power Comics line, lasted until April 1971, when it was merged into IPC's Valiant.
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. In addition to reprints of many of Marvel's most popular series, such as Spider-Man and the X-Men, there was also an attempt to create a home-grown British superhero: firstly with the Missing Link/Johnny Future, who appeared in Fantastic prior to its merger with Terrific, and subsequently with Tri-Man, who appeared in Smash! after its merger with Fantastic.Superheroes
The first superhero strip to appear in a Power Comic title was the Incredible Hulk, who showed up in Smash! #16. The Hulk's initial appearance took up a massive six pages, one-quarter of the 24-page issue, pushing five existing strips out of that issue.A month after the Hulk's debut, DC's Batman became the second American superhero to debut in Smash!, in issue #20, in re-edited reprints from American daily and Sunday newspaper strips. This was a response to the sudden and enormous popularity of the Batman television series starring Adam West.
The success of the Hulk then led to the introduction of the Fantastic Four into Wham! on 6 August 1966. The Fantastic Four eventually became the longest running Marvel strip, ultimately appearing in three Power Comics titles in succession. Spider-Man headlined Pow!, and more Marvel heroes followed: in 1967 Odhams launched two new titles entirely dedicated to Marvel superheroes: Fantastic and Terrific.
A distinctive feature of both Fantastic and Terrific was the full-colour pin-up that featured as the back cover of most issues. Many of these were reprinted from American Marvel comics, but at least some were produced especially for the Power Comics by a young Barry Windsor-Smith.
Reader outreach
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, who were "Alf and Bart" on some titles, and "Alf and Cos" on others. In point of fact, "Alf" was Odhams staff editor Alf Wallace, "Bart" was Eagle editor Bob Bartholomew, and "Cos" was Albert Cosser, who would later be the editor of TVTimes magazine. Each title had its own letter column, and also a half-page editorial, comparable in style and purpose to Marvel's "Bullpen Bulletins"."Britification"
As was standard practice with UK reprints of American comics, due to the larger UK page size, pages from the original American comics were rearranged to fit. Unlike the otherwise similar Marvel UK reprints of the 1970s, the Marvel material in the Power Comics was frequently edited to replace American spellings and slang with their British equivalents. Dialogue and/or images were also changed occasionally to remove snags in continuity caused by the lack of synchronisation between reprints of different storylines. The alterations were quite crudely done and easy to spot.One of the more controversial aspects of Power Comics was the relative lack of credit given to Marvel Comics and the American creators of the material used. For the first few weeks of the Marvel reprints the company was not acknowledged at all, but Odhams then had a change of heart and published a letter from a reader pointing out the origin of the strips. But, throughout, Marvel credit boxes containing the names of Stan Lee and collaborators such as Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby were invariably deleted from the splash pages; the space they occupied was either left blank or covered with drawn-in artwork. Apart from the compulsory copyright acknowledgment in small print, the name "Marvel" was never mentioned — wherever it appeared in the strips it was changed to "Power". Marvel continued to be mentioned occasionally, though. For example, when the Hulk was removed from Smash!, the editors had to justify the decision by admitting the reprints had caught up with the American originals. After a gap of several months, due to the character's popularity with readers, the Hulk reappeared, but this time in Fantastic.