Secret Wars, from Marvel UK, was the same kind of thing as Transformers - fortnightly, half colour and half monochrome, containing reprints of American comics. But this one was printing Secret Wars, the big epic 12-issue limited series featuring all the coolest Marvel superheroes and supervillains in one big epic storyline! They do one of those practically every week in American comics now, but in 1984 it was a brand new concept and very exciting!
And, like Transformers, the British comic needed a backup strip to pad out the American material. They sensibly chose Alpha Flight - a comic that didn't feature any of the superheroes who were involved in the main story. As luck would have it, in fact, the only significant guest stars in the first twelve issues of Alpha Flight were the Invisible Woman and the Sub-Mariner, neither of whom were in Secret Wars, so it worked out very nicely!
Also like Transformers, Secret Wars was about to move up to weekly publication. This seems to have caused a bit of confusion for the editors and awkward juggling of the available pages. Unlike Transformers (which at the same time as going weekly switched to 24 pages and full colour), Secret Wars remained at 32 pages until no. 19, and so someone decided it needed another backup strip.
This issue, no. 10, was the last to follow the pattern of roughly twelve pages of Secret Wars and roughly twelve pages of Alpha Flight (American comics of the time usually came in at 23-24 pages). For the weekly issues, it changed to eight pages or so from each of Secret Wars, Alpha Flight and Iceman. Trouble is, no. 10 started new American issues of both its stories, so splitting them up was going to be a little complicated...
And so Secret Wars no. 10 proudly boasts a whole fourteen pages of the American Secret Wars issue #6, backed up by the first ten pages of Alpha Flight issue #4 - with just a bit of fiddling from those ingenious British comic editors.
Alpha Flight #4 was cover-dated November 1983, six months before the first issue of the American Secret Wars series. It was written and drawn by John Byrne, who was also doing Fantastic Four at the time, hence the crossover. And it starts by referencing what was happening in the concurrent Fantastic Four comic, naturally enough...
Which is pretty easy for the UK editor to adjust, since Secret Wars was also about Mister Fantastic being mysteriously abducted (it happens to him a lot) - only the last line of Sue's speech bubble needed to be altered, to give British readers the impression this was happening simultaneously with the Secret Wars story in this issue!
The change in handwriting was always so obvious when UK comics made these alterations - the Planet Terry ones were less glaring, weren't they? But that's the only dialogue change that was necessary to reprint this issue of Alpha Flight. There's just the problem of the page count to deal with. Most of the early Alpha Flight comics had a 17-page main story and a backup strip of 6 pages detailing the origin of one of the heroes. This one issue is the exception to that - the main story takes up the whole comic, clocking in at 22 pages. And it does rather look like John Byrne stretched it out to that length with a bit of unnecessary padding, so for the UK comic to trim it down a bit might have been a quality judgement as well as a practical one! These are pages 10 and 11:
Yes, that's what it looked like in the original American printing, with the colours messed up on the second page and a big white border between the two halves of what was supposed to be one big panel at the bottom. The UK reprint, which ended the episode at this point, decided the first half of that big panel was quite enough to establish the scale of the Master's base, and cut out a couple of panels from the top row to give us this cliffhanger ending:
I think that looks rather better than the original! So, just one week later, we get the next UK issue of Secret Wars!
Now weekly! And really crammed with comics! The 32 pages (which, unlike American comics, includes the covers) contain 10 pages of Secret Wars, 10 pages of Alpha Flight and 8 pages of Iceman! There's barely room for a couple of text pages explaining the changes to the readers, and certainly no space for the usual number of ads and other filler!
I don't really see why it was necessary to add the Iceman limited series to the comic - Secret Wars maybe needed to go down to 8 pages to avoid catching up with the American printing, but Alpha Flight was old enough that they could have increased the pagecount of that without a problem. They probably just didn't want it to be two-thirds of a comic that was meant to be about Secret Wars.
Anyway, we've already stripped out one page from the Alpha Flight story. Is there anything else we can cut, to make sure everything fits in this UK reprint? Oh yes, it seems John Byrne's got a bit lazy towards the end...
That's pages 19 and 20 of the original comic. And while you might say it's justified and necessary to show the sheer scale of the explosion, I think filling two pages with it is a bit much. Still, it made it easy to trim another page out for the UK reprint!
And so, once again, the day is saved, thanks to Alpha Flight and some clever editing!
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