I think it's time this blog had a change of pace. Too much waffling lately about what I've been up to, not nearly enough pretending to be clever and knowledgeable about comics. So inspired by Lew Stringer's wonderful blog, here's a little treatise on the subject of Marvel UK's late-seventies comic, "Rampage". I didn't read it at the time it came out (I was born in 1976, it launched in 1977), but I’ve found quite a lot of them at car boot sales over the years.
In those days, before the Transformers comic showed the world that Marvel's British offices could produce their own material that was much better than the American stuff, British Marvel comics consisted of black-and-white reprints of years-old American comics. Rampage specialised in the adventures of the Defenders, a great favourite team of mine. It reprinted a complete issue of Defenders, 22 pages, every week, which was excessively long by the standards of British comics, which usually consisted of a series of six-page stories. And Rampage also had back-up strips, of course (nobody then believed British readers would touch a comic with only one story in it) - you could also read a quarter to a third of an American issue of Iron Man and Nova in every issue. Well worth 10p of anyone's pocket money.
What I like about Rampage is the covers. They used the same line art as the American comics, but re-coloured and re-lettered. Sometimes with the same words as the American version, sometimes subtly different. They seem to have been reluctant to use so many words on Rampage. For example, the speech bubbles on the cover of Defenders #30 go:
Hulk: NO! Hulk can't fight GAS!
Nighthawk: We haven't a CHANCE! Can't get PAST these choking FUMES!
Doctor Strange: We're facing our most INCREDIBLE foe -- and he may DESTROY US ALL!
Whereas on Rampage #30, they say:
Hulk: Hulk can't fight GAS!
Nighthawk: NO WAY can we pass those choking FUMES!
Doctor Strange: We're facing our deadliest foe -- and he may DESTROY US ALL!
Incidentally, the deadly foe was a tap-dancing super-villain called Tapping Tommy. On the other hand, the reprint of Defenders #2, which had no speech bubbles on the original cover, is enhanced by the bad guy shouting "Surfer! Hulk! Namor! None of you will survive the WRATH of the WARRIOR WIZARD!"
Occasionally, the re-lettering required some intelligence. They fixed the problem with Defenders #27, which showed Dr Strange intoning "The Baddoon WOMEN are far more SAVAGE than their men! Unless I strike swiftly, HULK and VALKYRIE are DOOMED!" This rather gave away what was supposed to be a surprise plot twist in the NEXT month's issue, that the lizard creatures the Defenders were fighting were in fact the females of the Baddoon species they'd been tangling with for some time. The Rampage version replaces Doc's faux pas with "The LIZARD CREATURES have risen from the MARSH!"
This, however, is the most interesting of the Rampage covers. Here's Defenders #17, published in 1974:
And here's Rampage #16, from 1978:
Notice that the Hulk's role has been strikingly diminished as it crossed the Atlantic. Now, the Hulk ("Marvel's TV Sensation", as they liked to call him in those days), was the only reason a lot of people read Defenders in the first place. A couple of later Defenders covers claimed he was in an issue where in fact he didn't appear at all. There's no way the UK Marvel people decided to re-draw the cover to make the Hulk less significant. They must have got hold of the original American art, which must have been altered before the American Defenders comic hit the newsstands to make the Hulk MORE prominent and sell more copies! And they would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for those meddling Brits.
Another funny thing about Rampage is the issues of Defenders it chose to reprint. The earliest one I've got is Rampage #3, containing Defenders #2. So either the first two Rampages each only contained half of Defenders #1 (which wasn't double-sized) or they reprinted one of the three issues of Marvel Feature which introduced the team before they got their own series. I have no idea which. Rampage then reprinted a complete Defenders story every week, but skipped Defenders #9 and #10, which were part of a crossover story with Avengers (to get the whole story, you had to read an issue of Defenders, then an issue of Avengers, then the next Defenders and so on). Maybe Marvel UK repeated the whole crossover somewhere else, maybe they just didn't bother with it, I don't know. So from that point on, Rampage’s issue numbers were one behind Defenders.
However, as well as the Defenders comic in America, there was also ‘Giant Size Defenders’, part of Marvel’s experiment with longer, more expensive, quarterly comics. They didn’t catch on, and their only lasting legacy is the existence of a comic called “Giant Size Man-Thing”, but there were also five less innuendo-worthy Giant Size Defenders comics too. The first of these consisted of reprinted stories with a perfunctory framing sequence, so it’s understandable that Rampage chose not to reprint it. The second was a weird story involving the Son of Satan that’s in a very different style to the usual Defenders stuff, and I think I would have skipped it too if I’d been in charge of Rampage. But they also skipped #3 and #4, the first of which, although self-contained and having no bearing on the long-term plot, was absolutely brilliant, and the second containing a very significant moment (Nighthawk’s love interest has her arm blown off in an explosion, which is a very unusually graphic kind of injury for seventies comics) which is referenced repeatedly in future issues, but which Rampage readers never got to see. Rampage finally gave in and reprinted GSD #5, which was an integral part of a long storyline – they split it over two weekly issues and changed the cover blurb from “A complete Defenders story every week!” to “A book-length Defenders story every week!”
But then they unfathomably skipped Normal-Size Defenders #26, another part of that extended plotline, albeit one that consisted almost entirely of unnecessary filler. You can cut it out and still follow the story with no problems, but why would you want to?
Rampage kept on reprinting Defenders for quite some time, even after the American comic was a long way past its best, but finally gave in to popular demand and switched to reprinting Hulk and X-Men stories instead. Shame, really, because if I’d been a comics fan at the time, Rampage would have been my favourite.
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