Hulk Comic Primer
In 1972 Marvel Comics moved into the UK comic book market, opening up Marvel UK. However, the comic book market in Britain was very different with comic books being published on a weekly basis. In order to match the competition, Marvel UK published a number of books that were anthology titles. Each title would take a number of American comic books and chop them up so they could fit in this format. With over a decade worth of comics, Marvel had a ton of material that could be localized for British readers and published. However, as demand increased, Marvel UK did create some of its own in-house material.
In 1979, due to the popularity of the Incredible Hulk TV show (starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno) Marvel UK started publishing Hulk Comic to capitalize on the character’s newfound popularity.
Hulk Comic was also an anthology title which featured reprints of the Hulk, Eternals, and old Ant-Man stories from Tales to Astonish. It also included original materials including original Hulk stories, as well as new on-going Nick Fury and Black Knight/Captain Britain stories, and introduced a new character, the war-time vigilante called the Night Raven.
The Hulk stories were normally one-off tales that usually didn’t really amount to much since the writers probably did not want to interfere with te continuity that was being established over in the United States. The original Nick Fury stories ended with issue #19 and Night Raven was a regular feature until issue #20. Issue #21 saw an end to original Hulk stories by the UK staff in favour of straight reprints of American stories until issue #26-28 before going back to reprints.
Original Black Knight/Captain Britain stories remained constant until issue #30 when artist John Stokes went on vacation for a number of weeks. To fill the gap, Hulk Comic reprinted old Captain Britain stories from the first volume of his own series as well as a Black Knight story from Marvel Super-Heroes #17. As 1979 came to a close the Black Knight/Captain Britain story picked up where it left off continuing the story in issue #43, a story that would continue on into the next the early 80s.
A lot of these stories are long lost gems that have yet to be reprinted. However, Marvel reprinted all of the Night Raven stories from Hulk Comic (and other UK titles) in Night Raven: The Collected Stories trade paperback. The Black Knight/Captain Britain stories were reprinted by Panini in the UK in 2008 (Panini is licensed to republish Marvel Comics in the UK) however, select stories in Captain Britain: Legacy of a Legend trade paperback.
