They don't make summer specials like they used to. Back in the good old days of the mid-1980s, there would be a whole lot of new and exciting comic specials on the shelves at this time of year, reprinting old comics you might not have seen the first time around. A good thing to get your parents to buy for you on a trip to the seaside if they hadn't already been bankrupted by the cost of buckets and spades, sticks of rock and so forth.
If you picked up the latest Transformers comic in summer 1986, looking forward to the time when this year's summer specials would be advertised, you might have been a little confused at first. In Transformers no. 66, dated June 21st 1986, they possibly accidentally printed the advert for the spring specials which had come out in March...
What's interesting about this selection is the price - Transformers is 65p, Secret Wars 60p, Get Along Gang and Zoids 55p, Fraggle Rock and the A-Team a mere 45p. Possibly there were different numbers of pages to them (Transformers is the only one I've read), possibly there were additional costs involved in some (paying a colourist, for example, as I'll explain below), or possibly it's just maximising the profits a little bit - Transformers must have sold the best, despite the price tag, I would have thought (based on primary school memories of what was the coolest comic).
In the following week's Transformers comic, they printed the ad for the comics that were now coming out for the summer...
Now Transformers has gone up to 70p! Secret Wars still 60p, but Zoids has inched up to that price point too. Spider-Man and the (spider-like) Sectaurs just 45p, and if you had plenty of money to spare and wanted something other than reprints of mostly American comics, you could fork out a whole £1.10 for a Doctor Who special!
And if you or your parents had LOTS of money and very little sense, you could spend an outrageous £2.50 on these special "books" from Marvel. They look impressive in this ad, but the content of them actually didn't give you much more than the summer specials did. The Transformers "Complete Works" contained just the first two issues of the American comics. About 48 pages' worth of Transformers, that had originally appeared across four 25p comics in 1984. That's inflation for you.
But to be fair, when these Transformers comics originally appeared, there was a significant difference. Half the pages of UK Marvel comics in those days were uncoloured. Summer specials added colour to the lineart of pages that didn't originally have it, and gave us a glorious technicolour special! Each of the specials in the ads above were 48 pages, including the covers, of which 44 were reprints of the comics. The first two "collected comics" had contained the four-issue original American series; these ones reprinted the first UK-original material that they had to produce while waiting for the Americans to come up with more of the stuff!
This cover, by John Ridgway, was originally drawn for the second issue of the UK Transformers comic (reprinting the second half of the first American issue). The scene actually fits much better with the story contained in this special, "Man of Iron", in which the Autobots pay a visit to England and interact with a local boy.
And the inside front cover advertises these must-have Ladybird book-and-tape adventures! You could also buy the books on their own, but the cassette tapes were really quite awesome too, with music and (as advertised) sound effects, as well as an enthusiastic narrator reading the book. And just look at that "special gift box" you could buy, for only £5.95! That's a whole two pence cheaper than buying the three of them separately!
I do like the way the contents page describes it as a story "from yesteryear". That means "literally last year", since it had originally appeared in January and February 1985. But it's right to say that the original comics were almost impossible to find by the spring of 1986 - there was really no way to acquire back issues in those days except finding someone who'd bought it at the time and didn't want it any more.
Bluestreak only appears in a couple of panels of this story - I get the feeling they've used this picture of him thinking it was Jazz (who's played up as the main star in the paragraph to the left), and not bothered to fix it when someone noticed. This is his box-art picture, showing him in the blue colour scheme that wasn't used on the toy, which was silver. The original art of his couple of panels was uncoloured; this collected comics reprint makes him a silver-grey to match the toy.
And after those 44 full-colour pages of excitement, we get a rather old ad for the Dinobots, which by spring 1986 had been in the shops for a full year and weren't new at all! American readers might need to be told that no, we didn't get the toy of Swoop in this country. If you want to apologise for being so mean to us, I'll graciously forgive you. If you want to tell me we should have made our own toys rather than just importing yours, I'll concede that you've got a point there too. Let's move on into the summer!
This one gets a brand-new, specially-drawn cover by Will Simpson! The original covers of the comics this story first appeared in were ugly collages of panels cut-and-pasted from the story within, so probably weren't considered suitable for a summer special. For one thing, this new cover is drawn using the American character models, which weren't available to the British artists at the time these stories were drawn! The stories reprinted here had to use the toys as models, and although they do a good job, they would probably have been better with the simplified designs the Americans had come up with.
The advert on the inside front cover gives us some genuinely new and thrilling toys! The Special Teams! Combining Transformers! (We also didn't get the Constructicons in this country, so this was a brand new innovation for us). Giant robots made up of five smaller robots! Just look how cool they are! Even though they've forgotten to attach Bruticus's head!
This one has five chapters. It was written as four 11-page stories as before, but the last one was chopped in half and spread over two issues of the British comic. The American material still wasn't available, and they needed to stall for time! And as I've said before, we loved Transformers so much, we honestly didn't mind when there were only five pages of Transformers in our fortnightly Transformers comic! We'd take anything we could get, and be delighted with it!
And on the back cover, the all-new Ladybird book-and-tape! This is a really good one, too. I don't know why they originally released three of them at once, and then the fourth a little bit later on its own, but maybe there were production delays. Or maybe they just wanted a summer release to keep the excitement going. "Take the Transformers with you" was a great idea! You could force your parents to play it in the car's tape player on your way to Skegness!
I tell you, those were the days.
