For Christmas, I bought my brother a really cool comic book - Planet Terry, the complete collection! To understand just why that's so cool, you need to cast your mind back to 1985, when the coolest thing in the world (to eight-year-olds, at least) was Transformers.
The Transformers comic produced by Marvel Comics' UK offices had a bit of a problem in the early days. It started out in late 1984 as a fortnightly comic - some pages in monochrome and others in colour, as was the norm for this kind of thing - with the idea being that each issue would reprint half of an issue of the American Transformers comic, and the rest of the pages being filled up with any other comics that came to hand. And when the children of Britain inevitably moved onto the next big thing in a few months' time, Marvel UK would move on with them.
Thing is, Transformers turned out to be much bigger than anyone had expected - the American four-issue bi-monthly series was turned into an ongoing monthly title, but there was a three-month lag before it started, and the UK comic had caught up with it. They had to start creating their own Transformers stories, until American stuff was available to them! By amazing good fortune, Simon Furman soon got the job of writing these stories, and produced real works of literary quality where absolutely any dross would have sufficed, and the greatest era of British comic history had begun!
But there was still a definite shortage of material to fill a fortnightly British comic. By number 16 (20th Apr - 3rd May 1985), they only had six pages of Transformers comic to put in it, and so needed another backup strip to pad out the comic along with Machine Man. The qualifying criteria for Transformers backup strips was that there had to be a robot in it, and so the first thing the Marvel UK editor found was Planet Terry, a new American series. Terry wasn't a robot, but his sidekick Robota fitted the bill.
Planet Terry was part of Marvel USA's Star Comics brand - mainly designed for comic adaptations of children's cartoons (Ewoks, Get Along Gang, Muppet Babies, all that kind of thing) but also containing several titles in the style of Harvey Comics with adventures aimed at younger children than the usual Marvel titles were.
Everyone hated Planet Terry - or claimed to, at least. Personally, I always loved it, but when you're eight years old (nearly nine), you have to be careful about admitting to liking the part of a comic that's conspicuously written for younger readers than the rest of it. I'm sure a lot of other readers felt the same, because Planet Terry is really, really good! It didn't last long in the Transformers comic, ending in number 25, after which UK Transformers (having become stupendously, unbelievably popular with UK kids!) went weekly, full colour, and containing at least 11 pages of actual Transformers comic content in every single issue!
Reading the complete collection of the American Planet Terry series, most of which I'd never seen before, I was familiar with some parts, but had no recollection of others. My brother - who, as I've lamented many times before, has a much better memory than me - looked at it and said "Oh, that's interesting - to get to a suitable ending point in the British comic, they cut from the first tier of page 4 of the American issue #3 to the second tier of page 18! They must have changed the dialogue a little to make it work, but I don't remember quite how..." I personally don't think anyone should be able to remember in such detail a comic they read at the age of seven, but since our copy of the key issue number 24 of the British comic was lost many decades ago, we had no way to check exactly what it did.
Until.. today! Because I've bought on eBay a copy of that treasure, and can show the world how fascinatingly complex the adaptation of Planet Terry really was!
Wow, that's a great cover. Is it any wonder we loved this comic so much? The UK comic used the covers to the American one when they were available, but most of the time they had to create their own, and the UK originals looked so much better! And then, Shockwave was always super-cool, because he was one of the many American toys that weren't available in this country, so had that unattainable air of mystery about him!
But anyway, the Planet Terry backup strip starts out with a straight reprinting of the first few pages of the American Planet Terry #3. American version from the collected edition on the left, British version from the Transformers comic on the right. And note how good the editor of the UK Transformers comic was - the credit for 'colorist' has been anglicised to 'colours' in the small print at the bottom of the page. It's all the stranger, since there's no colouring on most of the Planet Terry story in this issue - it's confined mostly to the monochrome pages!
But what's that at the bottom of page 3? The British comic has removed the bottom tier and replaced it with the first tier of page 4! This is how the American comic continued from that point...
And then Terry is abducted and forced to take part in a series of space arcade games! It's not until page 18 that he manages to get back to his spaceship and get back on track to finding his parents...
While the version of the story in the UK Transformers comic starts with the second tier of page 4, then leaps to the bottom three tiers of page 18!
That's a fascinating edit. If they'd left the original bottom tier of page 3 in place, it would have fitted more smoothly - I guess the editor (I'm assuming Ian Rimmer, though I wouldn't be astonished to find it was Simon Furman, who was very good at this kind of thing) thought it was necessary to retain the pathos of Terry's "picture of his parents" (an empty frame that he himself has signed "To Terry, love Mom & Dad" because he's sure that's something they would have said). It's been seen before in the series, but it's referenced a few pages later in the American comic, reprinted in the next British issue.
This means that the dialogue in the second panel of the top tier (a feed-line for a silly joke in the removed part of the American issue) has to be rewritten, as do Terry's and Robota's lines in the second tier. It's done very well, too! The British Transformers comic later developed a reputation for really obvious rewriting of the American material in clumsy and ugly handwriting, but these changes are almost unnoticeable!
Then the two versions of the story synch up for the final page of the British printing - which gets to appear in full colour, unlike the rest of the story!
There are only three remaining pages of the American comic, which seem to conclude with Terry finding his parents at last. The first page starts with Terry identifying the monster as "the Devourer who escaped game one!", so that must have been changed in the British printing of Transformers number 25. Don't worry, I've got one of those on order too, so I'll make sure the world knows exactly what those last three pages looked like to UK readers in 1985 as soon as it arrives!
I really did love Planet Terry. They don't make comics like they used to!
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