EAGLE COVER CAVALCADE

Continuing with the covers of the 'new' Eagle, here's the second dozen that were available back in 1982.  Comics for girls had been using photo-stories for years, but it was a novelty as far as comics for boys were concerned.  It couldn't have gone down too well with readers in the long-run, as the weekly started featuring 100% illustrated strips after just over a year, but it was probably a good way of garnering attention at the time of the comic's launch.

There'd been a gap of around 13 years between the old and the new Eagle, which ended 24 years ago.  Perhaps it's time for Mark III ?  More covers before too long.

THE COMPLETE FANTASTIC FOUR

How could it not work?  A comic reprinting a fairly recent Fantastic Four  story, along with a classic tale from the earliest days of the cosmic quartet?  Success was surely guaranteed you'd have thought.  But no, after only 37 issues, the comic bit the dust and the FF and The Invaders  (who'd been added a few weeks before in what appears to have been an attempt to boost sales) moved over to The Mighty World Of Marvel  the following week.  Still, it was a brave attempt, and though there was another try at an FF weekly a few years later, it wasn't until Panini  released a full-colour monthly in 2005 that they got their longest run yet in their own British mag.  One day we might get around to looking at that series, but in the meantime, here are all 37 covers from their 1977/1978 weekly comic.    

THE TITANS COVER CAVALCADE PART 1

It must have seemed a neat idea at the time.  Flip a comic on its side and reprint two US pages on one UK page, thereby increasing the content.  It was called the "landscape" format and worked for a while... 58 issues to be precise (and Super Spider-Man  followed its example for a time), but it was finally abandoned for the more traditional approach as it simply absorbed too much material to be viable longterm.  And, let's face it, it probably never sold as well as expected after the initial novelty had worn off.

However, The Titans  was an interesting experiment, and the title would return in a digest-sized "pocketbook" in the early 1980s, though that incarnation lasted for only 13 issues.  But that's a story for another time, so how about we just soak up the 30 images on display in this post and look forward to another 30 in a future one?  Deal?  Deal!    

And below is The Titans  annual for 1977, released near the end of 1976.