Defenders on a Rampage

 Some fifteen years ago, I blogged about Rampage magazine, and I expect all my readers to remember it vividly - but do go back and refresh your memory if you really must.

I've acquired plenty more old Rampage reprintings of Defenders comics since then, and learned a little more about the strange choice of which ones to reprint (the first two Marvel Feature stories with the Defenders appeared in Mighty World of Marvel magazine, and the third in the first issue of Rampage, before the second issue printed the first issue of the Defenders' own American comic), and I'm still fascinated by the variations in covers between the American and British titles! Some of the Rampage covers were word for word identical to the Defenders originals, rather more of them were rewritten to convey the same idea in slightly different words, and a wonderful few were wildly different in many ways. So here are my favourite, in no particular order, cases of translating Defenders into Rampagers!

Rampage 16 / Defenders 17

The most interesting one, of course - obviously Rampage was using an earlier draft of the American cover, before it was reworked to make the Hulk more prominent. The British dialogue sounds more like Cage's usual speech patterns, too...

Rampage 17 / Defenders 18

I just like how Defenders has 'Rampage' as a subtitle and vice versa. This is also a good demonstration of the way the British team didn't seem to have the coloured covers to hand, but just the line-art. They normally get the characters' colour schemes right, but the Wrecker is very wrong on this one.

Rampage 13 / Defenders 14

Spot the difference? The melodramatic "Alas" in the American cover caption was changed to a much more down-to-Earth "And" in the British version!

Rampage 32 / Defenders 32

But this one goes in the opposite direction - "take a look at" became a much more Death-like "behold" when this one crossed the Atlantic! Nighthawk is twice as horrified by it!

Rampage 28 / Defenders 28

Need we say more? Well, the good people of Rampage obviously thought the cover needed to say much, much more, and added a whole lot of excited-sounding captions! The robot shooting at the Hulk has been pivoted just a little, too, I guess to make the cover fit right on the Rampage page.

Rampage 27 / Defenders 27

With this one, the Rampage version is correcting a problem with the original comic - we're not meant to know these creatures are the Baddoon women until next issue, so it's a very intelligent rewrite! Even more interestingly, they've had to lower Dr Strange slightly to make the picture fit in the different dimensions of the Rampage cover - British comics were physically bigger than the American equivalent, but the cover illustration had to be squashed down a bit, or extended to the sides, to fit on the British covers. In this case, they did both - there's a good chunk of art to the left of the British cover that must have been cropped for the Americans.

Defenders 29 / Rampage 29

This one is a particularly great adaptation of the Defenders original cover. Not so much for the colouring - the aliens are meant to be green, not orange - but again for the subtle repositioning. Nighthawk is lower down, to reduce the height, and that meant someone had to re-draw the viewscreen behind him. Originally at an angle, it's now directly facing the reader. But the British cover also restores some things that must have been edited out of the American version - some kind of piece of wall, still at the angle the original viewscreen was, and also an extra alien soldier on the far left!

Rampage 6 / Defenders 5

With this earlier cover, the illustration stretches out quite a lot further to the right than it does on the Defenders version, but the really fun part is the speech bubbles. I think they must have just stuck them on the Rampage cover in the wrong order - if they'd deliberately decided to change the structure of Yandroth's sentence, they would probably have also fixed the punctuation...

Rampage 4 / Defenders 3

And this one is really great - they've amputated the Undying One's wings!

Rampage was great, though - a complete Defenders story every week, as the covers always boasted, plus backup strips too! I think black-and-white comics have gone sadly out of fashion now, but I'm sure with a bit of good marketing, Marvel UK could get British kids interested in this kind of thing again!