British Update: Fantastic and Terrific from First to Final issues
*Power Comics: Although Alan Class had been reprinting Marvel super-hero tales in his various titles from the early 1960s – and Len Miller presented some in his anthologies ‘Spellbound’ and ‘Mystic’ – it took until 1967 before a concerted attempt was made to reprint Marvel superheroes in sequential order. That was in the Power Comics weeklies, and after trials in Smash! Wham! and Pow!, they released Fantastic, a weekly devoted entirely to super-heroes, with Thor, Iron Man and the X-Men from the beginning, in glorious black & white and oddly re-edited for the UK market (such as changing American idioms for more intelligible jargon). We may mock – in fact, those of us who’d been reading the originals all along did – but for those benighted parts of the country where the American editions weren’t imported, this was a gift much appreciated, and many people’s first exposure to the Marvel Universe was in these pages. Followed later that same year by Terrific weekly – starring the Avengers, Sub-Mariner and Doctor Strange – these hooked an entire generation of readers on the Marvel habit, and we are delighted to have almost full runs of both, from their first to their final issues (#89 for Fantastic, #43 for Terrific) back in stock for your browsing pleasure!