Sunday, July 21, 2024

Make your summer special

 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.

Saturday, July 20, 2024

Unexpected existential crisis

 The British Othello Federation committee are discussing European and World championship events which will or might happen over the next few years, and in the middle of idly thinking about the dates it struck me like a bolt from the blue that I'll be FIFTY years old when these imminent competitions happen in late 2026 or early 2027!

I have honestly never considered that before, I suddenly realise now. I regularly tell people I'm 47, by way of asserting my greater life experience than the impudent youngsters I'm saying it to, but the concept of me being 50, at a time that people are discussing right now as something that is actually going to happen... has never once crossed my mind before.

That's a bit disturbing, all things considered. I think I'm just going to go back to bed, possibly forever, and forget about the whole thing.

Sunday, July 14, 2024

Dressed from head to foot in white garments

 I spent the afternoon in the bath (have I mentioned I've got an enormous and luxurious bathtub?) reading The Woman in White and watching the Wimbledon final. There's a whole theme there that I wasn't really intending, but you could see it as doing my bit to support the team who'll (presumably) be wearing white in tonight's final.

I'm not sure if I want them to win, actually. I sort of want to see the 'sixty years of hurt' hit single in 2026.

Saturday, July 06, 2024

Nations of the Globe

A slightly delayed write-up of the British National Othello Championship last weekend, at the Globe 'music venue and bar' in Newcastle. Actually, on the Saturday at least, it was a venue of silent and sober concentration in the upper room, and by the time the live music started downstairs on the Sunday all the competitors were totally in the zone and barely noticed.

We had eleven players, which is exactly the worst number for a nine-round tournament (followed by one-game final). There's a bye, and all but two of the players get the bye at some point. Everyone plays nearly but not quite everyone else. And if you're doing the pairings manually, it becomes an absolute nightmare to pair people on a similar number of points by the time you get to the last couple of rounds. It makes you feel guilty about turning up, knowing that if you didn't it would have been ten players and a wonderfully appropriate round-robin.

But I was doing the pairings, which makes me a Very Important Part of the whole proceedings and not guilty at all about being there. And the pairings weren't done by hand (as was, for many years, the tradition at the Nationals), and nor were they done on the venerable, ancient and incomprehensible Papp program that has been used in our tournaments before now. No, we used the shiny new and astonishingly simple FlipTheDisc.com, which I heartily recommend to anyone who's wanting to run a tournament of their own. You can see all the results from this and other tournaments in the "Live Events" section, and play through the final game on screen here if you're so inclined. It's like living in the future! We all agreed the spirit of Adelaide, for many years the manual-pairer, was guiding the whole thing and making it work.

Reigning champion Guy Plowman couldn't make it due to an incident with a deer and his car, but we had Imre Leader with, as the BOF website puts it, "almost uncountable British Championships to his name" (it's true - you run out of fingers and have to take both shoes and socks off to count on your toes, which isn't always convenient in polite society), plus multiple-winner Joel Feinstein (you still need the fingers of both hands for him, but the shoes can stay on), and others including young Lithuanian superstar Marius JuodelÄ—, who was a hot favourite after winning other competitions all over the place in recent years.

I myself played pretty terribly all round. Actually, the only two games I was really happy with were two I lost, against Imre and Bruce Kyte. It's not like I was in with a chance of winning either of them at any point, but they were thrilling and entertaining games that were close and a lot of fun to play. Bruce, though, was the one who set the early pace, being the only one on three points after three rounds. The ranking list was always tight and exciting all the way through, with no runaway leader. I was never in contention, but plenty of other people were in with a chance of making the final or the 3rd/4th place play-off.

On Saturday night we went to the really great Persia restaurant in Newcastle, which I heartily recommend. It could become a Newcastle othello tradition, like the Indian meal in Cambridge that's an essential part of the events there!

The final ended up as Imre vs Marius (who was fractionally ahead of Joel on Brightwell Quotient tie-break score - another thing that makes you very thankful it didn't have to be calculated manually!), with Joel vs Bruce for 3rd place, and it ended up with Marius winning his first British Championship title! Bruce secured third place, and a good time was had by all!



So another name is added to the roll of honour and at least theoretically to the trophy (I forget whether the trophy has names on it, or whether I'm confusing it with the European one - I don't tend to win these trophies, you see, and the British one is still with Guy the last I heard. If it does have names on it, an almost uncountable number of years' winners doubtless need to be updated). I still have it on my bucket-list to get my name on this list one day, although I haven't yet formed any concrete plans as to how to go about it.

1977

Alan Woch

1978

Geoff Davidson

1979

Alan Woch

1980

Neil Cogle

1981

John Parker

1982

David Stephenson

1983

Imre Leader

1984

David Sharman

1985

Neil Stephenson

1986

Imre Leader

1987

Peter Bhagat

1988

Graham Brightwell

1989

Joel Feinstein

1990

Imre Leader

1991

Joel Feinstein

1992

Joel Feinstein

1993

Joel Feinstein

1994

Imre Leader

1995

Graham Brightwell

1996

Joel Feinstein

1997

Joel Feinstein

1998

Graham Brightwell

1999

Imre Leader

2000

Graham Brightwell

2001

Imre Leader

2002

Garry Edmead

2003

Garry Edmead

2004

Imre Leader

2005

Imre Leader

2006

Graham Brightwell

2007

Imre Leader

2008

David Hand

2009

Michael Handel

2010

Imre Leader

2011

Guy Plowman

2012

Borja Moreno

2013

David Hand

2014

Guy Plowman

2015

Imre Leader

2016

Imre Leader

2017

Imre Leader

2018

Imre Leader

2019

Imre Leader

2020

Covid-19

2021

David Hand

2022

Imre Leader

2023

Guy Plowman

2024

Marius JuodelÄ—


Friday, June 28, 2024

Simplicity

 The most recent Excel Esports challenge, titled "The Simple Case" was a brilliant piece of creativity. You had to do sums with fifty-digit numbers (too long for Excel to calculate exactly) using Excel. That's exactly the kind of thing I would like to think I could do well, but actually, I was completely rubbish at figuring out the best way to do it within the time limit. I blame the early-morning start, or possibly just the fact that I'm generally completely rubbish. But I do appreciate the cleverness of thinking the task up!

Another early start tomorrow will be followed by another exercise in computerised simplicity. I'm going to Newcastle for the British Othello Championship, and have been volunteered to run the pairing program at short notice. Another thing I'm rubbish at is saying no, which should have been easy since two other competitors had already explained that they're too scared of apps to do something like this. But as everyone knows, I'm entirely incapable of turning people down, despite my own all-conquering fear of apps and technology in general.

But in all fairness, the "app" in question (which can be run on a laptop like normal things and doesn't require a mobile phone at all) is supremely simple and requires no more brainpower than typing in names and numbers and clicking a button to say you've done it. I'm almost not scared of it at all! And it looks possible that we'll have ten competitors for the nine-round competition, which is the kind of arrangement that can be done on old-fashioned pen and paper with no apps or anything anyway. It probably won't be a spectacular disaster in any way, except in the sense that I'll probably lose all my games and then a big weight will fall on me. I'm prepared for the worst, you see.

Friday, June 21, 2024

Spidey in Black or Red and Blue

 In late June 1985, when I was a few months away from nine years old, a very important comic was published - the Spider-Man Summer Special!

One pound twenty was an exorbitant price to pay for a comic in those days! Sure, this is a special kind of comic - 48 full-colour pages inside cardboard covers (the interior pages are numbered 3 to 50), as opposed to the standard Marvel UK comics of the time, which were 32 pages including covers, half of them monochrome and the other half in colour. But those standard comics cost 27p in 1985, a more reasonable kind of price for children with a couple of 20p coins in their pockets1. A volume like this, costing £1.20, was something you'd only get as a special treat.

I, or maybe my brother2, got this when we went to Butlin's that summer, probably. Superhero comics weren't something I was interested in at the time, and Marvel UK seemed in a big way to share my view. In earlier years, they had reprinted the American comics in a variety of British titles, but those had been dropped by this point. The long-running British Spider-Man comic was still going, but Marvel UK had emphatically retooled it to be aimed at "younger readers" - the stories inside were Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, plus some very kiddy backup strips. It was probably because British superhero fans were increasingly able to buy the American full-colour originals, and no longer purchased the UK monochrome reprints when they came out months later. I assume the "for younger readers" approach was an attempt to build up a new generation of superhero fans over here, giving up on the previous ones and leaving them to mail-order their American titles instead.

This comic was the "debut" appearance of Spider-Man's black costume! This is a good example of the lag between America and Britain in those days. By summer 1985, the black costume was old news in America! It first appeared in Spider-Man's own comic in January 1984, along with a promise that readers would learn where it came from in the all-new Secret Wars limited series, the first of the twelve issues of which went on sale at the same time. The black costume doesn't show up until the eighth issue of Secret Wars, on sale at the end of August, by which time readers of the various comics Spidey appeared in had already had months to get used to it, had learned in July that it was an alien symbiote and now were fiercely arguing about whether it was a good or bad idea to go back to the classic look.

Readers of Marvel UK's comics didn't know anything about these recent developments in the superhero world, except as revealed in the UK's Secret Wars comic, which launched at the end of April 1985, reprinting the more-than-a-year-old American title. And even then, it needed lots of editorial text pages explaining who the more recently-created superheroes in it were, and what had changed about the other ones since Marvel UK stopped reprinting their adventures. The introductory page above catches up readers of the Summer Special on what they need to know, and an ad on the back page tells them where they can read more of Spidey's advetures...

I was very confused by that picture. You really have to study it to see it's meant to be a large Spider-Man head behind a coat-hanger on which his two costumes are hanging.

It would be a while before readers of Secret Wars in Britain could "see the first appearance of Spidey's great new black costume" - the comic didn't catch up to that point until October. In June, apart from Secret Wars, Marvel UK's diminished range of titles went like this. No American reprinted superheroes except the Spider-Man comic you might want to treat your younger brother or sister to3.

We4 only got two of these comics - the fortnightly Transformers, and Return of the Jedi in the weeks when Transformers didn't come out. Jedi was basically unreadable rubbish, bought only because one had to buy a comic, but Transformers was something very special!

Transformers toys made their sensational appearance in Britain in 1984. Unlike a lot of American toys in those days, which wouldn't reach these shores until a year or more after their stateside release, we got Transformers at the same time as the Americans! And they were MASSIVE. Sensationally popular, and so Marvel UK naturally rushed out a comic, which kids at the time snapped up. It reprinted the brand-new American Transformers comic almost immediately after its US publication, which caused a bit of a problem when the American "four issue limited series" came to an end. Obviously, Transformers were still so hugely popular on both sides of the Atlantic that the series had to continue, but the US branch of Marvel were able to wait a couple of months to create some more material before launching it as an ongoing series.

Marvel UK didn't want to do that. The Transformers comic was selling like hot cakes. So they took the step of creating their own stories, and they were brilliant! We snapped it up, even when the actual Transformer content of the comic was a bit on the minimal side - number 19, advertised in the checklist above, is a classic example. It contains five pages of Transformers comic, seven of Machine Man, seven of Planet Terry, a four page comic telling "the true story" of the Battle of Hastings, two pages of the Chromobots, and a lot of padding to fill its 32 pages. And we loved it!

But back in October 1984, when the American comic was still being reprinted in the British pages, Spider-Man made a guest appearance, complete with black costume! So for fans of the Transformers comic, like me, the black costume was already familiar!



But let's return to the 1985 Summer Special. The Spider-Man stories in it weren't the first I'd ever seen - that honour might go to the Spider-Man Annual published in 1980, which had been around Grandma's house since time immemorial.5 That annual contains one particularly wonderful story, reprinted from Spectacular Spider-Man #21, written by Bill Mantlo and exploring very much the same kind of themes I'm going to be talking about at length when I finally start talking about the Summer Special, but perhaps I was just too young at the time to really appreciate it. There had been other stories here and there, I'm sure, but I'd never read the comics with any kind of regularity or even interest. Spidey was, of course, a part of popular culture who everyone knew about, and I'm sure I was more than familiar with him by osmosis even before the Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends cartoon appeared on TV in 1983. But my idea of what Spider-Man, and general superhero, comics were like was only very vague. I certainly didn't think of them as being as mature or intelligent as the kind of real literature you might find in the Transformers comic or an actual book!


And then came this Summer Special. And my mind was blown like never before. The first story, with Spider-Man facing Jack O'Lantern (from the American Spider-Man comic #254), was all right. It didn't make much impact on me, but it was pretty cool. But the second story, which originated in Marvel Team-Up #145, was something else. It wasn't a superhero story.

It was written by Tony Isabella, who I always list among the comic creators I admire the most, solely because of this story and the effect it had on my eight-year-old self. Perhaps it was just the right place and the right time, and I didn't really get into superhero comics until years later, but it might very possibly never have happened at all if I hadn't always had this example in mind. It does things that I had no idea you could do with the medium of costumed hero stories! Seriously, it blew my mind, like I've said before.

Tony Isabella, like all the best people, has a long-running Blogspot blog6. The artist, meanwhile, was Greg LaRocque, who again I don't particularly know outside this one important comic, but in those days Marvel had a healthy stable of very good artists who could deliver the right kind of action adventure in the house style. And of course we start with Spider-Man swinging through the streets of New York, because that kind of splash page is essential in a Spidey story. But the narrative captions make it clear that this isn't a superhero story...


It is, of course, an issue of "Marvel Team-Up", which means it's required to contain both Spider-Man and one other superhero. In this case, the co-star is Iron Man. And this is the problem with the whole Marvel Team-Up arrangement - it tended to feel a bit contrived. If Spidey's in New York, happens to meet one of the many other superheroes who hang around there, and they solve a problem together, that's okay. When the plot requires Spider-Man, Iron Man and Blacklash all to go to Cleveland for separate reasons, it's a bit less plausible. Especially since Iron Man was based in California at this point, and the story was clearly written in the belief he was still living in NY. The writer or editor slip a bit of dialogue into this page to justify his boarding a plane in New York.

This was almost certainly my first encounter with Iron Man (maybe a passing reference here and there in other comics I'd seen, but nothing more), and it's from the period when Jim Rhodes was wearing the Iron Man armour. Not knowing any of the back story, I just assumed Iron Man had always been Jim Rhodes, accompanied by his sidekick Morley Erwin. The multiple lines in this comic implying otherwise entirely passed me by. I was very confused and baffled when what felt like years later (but could actually only have been a few months - when you're 8/9 years old, you pack a lot of life experience into that period) I saw an episode of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends in which Iron Man is a different guy called Tony Stark. It didn't make any sense to me. How can a superhero be two different people? Boy, I hope someone got fired for that blunder. Luckily, in January 1986, the Marvel UK Transformers comic reprinted an Iron Man story ("Night of the Octopus") with Tony as the hero and included a potted history of Iron Man, explaining the difference between Tony Stark, Jim Rhodes, and Arno Stark, who had just appeared in the Machine Man backup strip as the man who would become Iron Man in the far-flung distant future world of the year 2020. My bewilderment was finally at an end. But back in summer 1985, Jim Rhodes was the only Iron Man I knew, and I still think he's the best to this day!

But this comic isn't about him, either. It's about the super-villain.


Spider-Man and Iron Man have both come to an electronics convention in Cleveland, Ohio. Tony Isabella lived in Cleveland, as did Superman's creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster back in 1938. It's an important town for superheroes! And, as it turns out, villains too. Because Mark Scarlotti, the super-villain Blacklash, is a Cleveland native. He's come to the convention hoping to get some leads to a job in engineering, but nobody will give him the time of day. He really is a scientific genius, but after his previous defeats by Iron Man, his identity as Blacklash has become public knowledge, and he can't get even people who don't know him to talk to him about work, perhaps because he just comes across as a little strange.

Which is the thing that's so great about this story. It's very clear and explicit that Mark is mentally ill. He's manic-depressive7 and suffers from violent mood-swings. We follow his thought bubbles as a brief burst of anger is enough even to set off Peter Parker's spider-sense - quite an impressive feat - before he lapses back into despondency. Seeing Iron Man at the convention, he thinks about attacking and defeating him to get back in the good books of his former bosses in the Maggia (Marvel's unsubtle Mafia equivalent), but then gives up on the whole idea and gets the bus home.

He goes to see his mother, who tells him to just leave because his father wants nothing to do with him, and then goes for a drink to try to calm down. Which doesn't work out very well. These next two pages have an interesting side-story to themselves...


That's followed by an ad for the 1985 summer special line-up...

...And then we're back into the action, and a transition from the previous story page that always felt a little abrupt to me.

And that's because there's a page missing from the story as presented by the Summer Special! Despite the claim on the first page that it contains "two lengthy and spectacular complete tales", this second one is incomplete! Between Mark leaving the bar and bursting back in, the original comic has this page:

It doesn't look like Marvel UK had to cut a page out to fit the story into the special. There are two pages of puzzles in the middle of the comic that are obviously just there to take up space. I think it must just be that this page has Mark contemplating suicide, and someone decided that goes too far for a kids' comic. But taking out the whole page seems excessive - it's phrased very euphemistically in the original and could have been made even more vague and acceptable by just rewriting a few words. After all, they did have to rewrite the dialogue in the bottom panel of the previous page to paper over the cracks - in the original version of the story, it went like this:


(Both versions come back together with "...THIS!" as Blacklash smashes the counter to pieces with his electric nunchakas)

But Blacklash has got a job from the Maggia (who needed someone on the spot quickly and their first choice was unavailable) to kill a scientist at the convention, and his mood is now on a big upswing! He's back at the convention, all fired up, but still comes close to giving it up before revealing himself when he sees his friend Rusty is on guard there. But he's drawn into action when another security guard spots him, and it all leads to the big super-hero dust-up!


Our hero (villain) acquits himself very impressively. I always loved this manoeuvre (note the UK publication has altered the spelling into British English) against Spidey. It's a clever action sequence, and the art really makes it work!

But it's still two against one, or even three, because Morley is able to spot that Blacklash's gauntlets are giving off sparks (earlier in the story, Mark contemplated checking that his costume and equipment were all in order, but decided not to bother) and Iron Man is able to overload the suit. The scientist has got away, and Spidey strips off Mark's costume, which is enough to make him break down completely. The superheroes only need to wait around until the authorities come to take him away.



And THAT is why I love superhero comics. This is what made me realise you can tell any kind of story - genuine quality, intelligent literature - wrapped up in the genre conventions. I've said it before and I'll say it again, it blew my mind. Opened up whole new worlds. And all thanks to Tony Isabella and the Spectacular All-Colour Summer Special!8



1 Remember when 20p coins were new and exciting? The novelty still hadn't worn off in 1985.

2 We shared our comics and toys and things perfectly amicably, the question of ownership never came up, but it was nonetheless important to keep mental track of whom they had been bought for. I feel bad about not remebering "whose" comic this one was. He'll remember, no doubt.

3 I never treated my younger brother to a comic in those days. To be fair, our parents just bought the things for us. And I'm giving him this Summer Special as a birthday present now I've acquired a copy of it, so it's okay.

4 My brother owned these comics. I got the Beano. This fact is mildly embarrassing in these modern times.

5 Immemorial unless you've got some kind of super memory like I haven't, anyway. It maybe came from the boy who lived next door to Grandma after he'd got bored with it. His name was Elliot, apparently, which must have been a bit annoying in the days when ET was the new big thing.

6 I thought I was the only one! This is so cool!

7 It had already been renamed bipolar disorder by 1984, but only very recently, and you can forgive this story using the older term that readers would recognise.

8 I'm glad I didn't see this story under its original American cover, or read the original solicitation text, both of which are sadly lacking the subtlety of the story itself...

"Blacklash is back! He's the most dangerous psychotic ever to undertake a life of crime! Fighting sane villains is bad enough — how can Spider-Man and Iron Man defeat a totally unpredictable super-powered madman? They better find a way — or die!"

... That's just bad writing. British readers had a lucky escape!