When Marvel Comics sought to expand publishing outside of North America they set up Marvel UK in Britain. At the time, comics in the UK were published on a weekly basis. Marvel followed suit by reprinting their back catalog of superhero books and breaking up the stories so that a single issue’s worth of comic could be stretched out over a couple of weeks. Instead of publishing individual titles,Marvel published anthology books that contained multiple stories.

The one exception was Spider-Man. Given the popularity of the character, Spider-Man was given his own book but it was often shared with other superheroes. For whatever reason, hey couldn’t stick a single name during the run and so the title went through a number of name changes. First,it was called Spider-Man Comics Weekly, then Super Spider-Man, then Spider-Man Comic, then Spectacular Spider-Man Weekly, followed by Spider-Man TV Comic, Spider-Man (and his Amazing Friends), The Spider-Man Comic, and Spidey Comic.

The series was mostly reprinted stories with the exception of four issues in late 1984. If you believe what is out there on the internet, Marvel UK was afraid to reprint stories featuring Spider-Man in his then brand new black-and-white costume for fear of alienating readers. Having talked to my share of older Marvel UK fans, and finding most of them being entitled cunts, I can understand the hesitation. They were literally running out of stories, forced to reprint issues of Spidey Super Stories for some reason because again, UK readers were whiny cunts. Better that they choke down Spider-Man stories geared for toddlers than give them something new I suppose.

Anyway, there were four original Spider-Man stories that ran from Spider-Man #607-610, it featured Spider-Man going to the UK and fighting a villain called Assassin-8. It suffers from the same one-dimensional storytelling that most UK writers were forced to employ with the Hulk Comic since they couldn’t do anything big with these characters since it could interfere with what the American writers were working with.

Series Index