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!

Sweets from a Stranger

 Now this is another favourite from Nicholas Fisk, although one I discovered quite a bit later than the many other books of his I'd read - I can't exactly fix a date on when I read it, but I would think I must have been a teenager. It's a collection of ten short stories, and re-reading it now all these years later is quite fascinating...

The cover has nothing to do with any of the stories in the book. It's credited to Dave Holmes, and it fits the generally creepy-sci-fi theme of the stories, but I assume it wasn't specifically commissioned for this edition. I don't remember the cover of the one I had from the library (Boston library, I think) in the old days. The illustrations inside the book aren't very good, though - by David Barlow, they actually depict the scenes nicely, but the faces are horrible and spoil the whole effect.

Anyway, you don't buy this kind of book for the pictures. What interests me about these ten stories is how familiar or unfamiliar I was with them some thirty years later - does that reflect on how good or bad the stories were, or on my appreciation or understanding of them at the time? Here's a run through the contents:

1. Sweets from a Stranger

I remembered this one almost word for word; it's very good. Eleven-year-old Tina can't help but laugh when a car driver makes an inept attempt to persuade her to get into his car with an offer of sweeties. It turns out he's an alien, doing a terrible job of trying to prepare for an invasion, and Tina has to help him phone home to tell his bosses he just can't do it. Grateful, he offers to show her his home planet, she goes along with him... and finds she actually has been cleverly kidnapped. Brilliant.

2. The Thieves of Galac

This one, though, didn't ring a bell at all. Mala and Tal are among the few remaining humans who stayed behind on Earth after a successful conquest by robots sent from Galac. It's a pretty miserable place, and now the sentinel robots have started stealing pointless junk for their senile masters back home. The short story seems to go through at least three different plots that would fuel a full-length sci-fi novel of the 1950s, and I'm surprised nothing stuck in my brain, but it's not the most compelling one in the book.

3. Space Invaders

I remember this one well, though the ending didn't stick in my brain at all. Jason is addicted to playing video games at the arcade, and he's stolen money from his mum's purse to do it. He wins a lot of money on the games, gets tired, keeps playing, and loses it all. But as he's on his last few coins the arcade games talk to each other in machine-language, and one of the games decides Jason is such a nice player, it will let him win! It's a nice story, even if the only bits that I recall were the bits with the arcade games - this book was published in 1982, and it's a very 1982 idea of the future of video games, which seemed strange even when I first read it. Still fun, though!

4. Mind-Milk

No recollection of this one in the slightest. Alien creatures use their mindprobe to 'milk' the daydreams of children, only for it to turn out that one boy is daydreaming about destroying those same alien creatures. I probably don't remember this one because I just didn't get it... and I still don't really get what Nicholas Fisk was going for here. I suppose there'll always be a dud or two in a collection like this.

5. Perfect Paul

This one, on the other hand, I remember well, just because I remember it being a surprisingly stupid story from a great writer. Young Paul is a perfect child in every way, and when he dies in a bike accident, he's far too perfect to go to the normal good people's afterlife; he gets exclusive VIP treatment and gets sent to Uppermost, where his perfection even annoys the people there. So they give him the ultimate punishment, and have him reincarnated as a schoolteacher. It's a very lame punchline.

6. Oddiputs

From the worst to the best, this is one I remember very vividly, and it's brilliant. Oddiputs is a robot who doesn't quite work properly, and is the victim of constant teasing and mistreatment by evil eight-year-old Sally. Eventually, Oddiputs' flawed thinking process leads him to the conclusion that he must kill her. It's a very creepy battle of wits, with a great ending!

7. Swap-Shop

Again, this is one I remember clearly, though I'd forgotten there's an extra bit at the end. Bogey and Jo discover a hole in the wall that seems to be a portal to some other universe. If you put something in it, the other side will send back a superior alien equivalent, always powered by a little button with a golden worm spinning in it. After a lot of experimentation and attempts to communicate with the other side, Bogey climbs through the hole himself, and comes back... different. Very creepy and cool, but I remembered it as ending with the moment of his return and was surprised to find it goes on a bit beyond that, while still remaining inconclusive. Still fun to read, anyway!

8. Nightmare's Dream

This is why I wanted to write about the stories I remembered and didn't remember, because I don't remember reading this one at all, and I have a worrying feeling that this is because I completely missed what the story's all about. A normal boy has horrible dreams that he's a hideous alien monster chained up in a yard on Earth... or is it the other way around? Very cool, and although I hope my younger self did get it, I rather think he didn't. Oh well, at least I can appreciate it at the age of forty-five!

9. Cutie Pie

Another one where I didn't remember the ending. Is it a weakness with the stories that makes them a little anti-climactic, with the really good ideas earlier in the narrative? Or is it me not being an attentive reader? Maybe a little of both. Anyway, an adorable alien creature is brought to Earth from an inhospitable alien planet, and becomes the latest international sensation. But Cutie Pie doesn't thrive in the perfectly-recreated atmosphere of the planet he came from - and no wonder, because he's not a native of that planet, he'd gone there to endure the conditions as a test of manhood. Nearly killed by his captivity, he escapes, finds Earth's atmosphere much more liveable, and recovers. And then in a bit I don't remember at all, makes friends with a baby and goes back home. I think it IS the endings being anti-climactic, because the really great storytelling in a lot of these ones is already done by the middle of the tale!

10. Teddies Rule, OK?

This one's a complete blank in my memory. Little Mandy is inseparable from her teddy bear, and her father decides to surprise her by giving it artificial intelligence so it can talk back to her. And it all gets a bit creepy from there. But the story is rather vague about everything, and it's a slightly limp ending to a collection that's definitely got more hits than misses.

I really recommend this, and the rest of Nicholas Fisk's oeuvre, as essential reading! Please do find as many of them as you can, and maybe we can re-introduce him to a whole new generation! I'm sure nothing could go wrong with that idea, unless their teddy bears and robots start giving them ideas...

Mind sporting

Here's some advance warning - the British Othello Championship will be in Cambridge on July 23-24. Go here to read more and register! There will also almost certainly be a proper Mind Sports Olympiad in London at the end of August, with all the usual fun and games! Maybe even a memory competition, you never know. In any case, I'll be going to both.

Now this is the kind of thing the internet is made for

 You can get miniature arcade games nowadays, small enough to fit on your desk with a two-inch screen, but playing the arcade classics. You can get a Bubble Bobble, but it's the NES version - decidedly inferior to both the original arcade game and the Sega Master System one - so you probably shouldn't. But I stumbled across a blog belonging to a dedicated game fan, who ripped his miniature Pac-Man apart and discovered that the PCB inside contains six different games, but only one of them is unlocked for each different commercial release! Now that's the kind of money-saving hack the world really needs in these difficult economic times!

This is why I try to restrict random browsing of internet articles - now I'm feeling compelled to hack into the inner workings of everything I possess and see what transpires...