Which comic has the invincible IRON MAN each week? Which comic contains the fabulous X-MEN each week? Which comic features the mighty THOR each week? The answer, back in 1967 Britain, was Fantastic. And that autumn, if your parents had an exorbitant nine shillings and sixpence to spend on an annual for a Christmas present, you could read not just a full-length story for each of those heroes, but a whole lot of other exciting filler stuff too! 96 pages, including the hardback covers (that's how the pages are numbered, weirdly), half of them in full colour and the other 48 in red-and-black duotone. We're going to look today at some excerpts from the exciting X-Men adventure!
Fantastic Annual 1968 version on the left, original American version (or a modern reprint of it, anyway) on the right. It's a reprint of the third issue of the American comic, from back in 1963. And a subtly altered reprint, too - the editors seem to be worried that the British audience will find out it's an American comic unless they change a few things here and there! As you can see on this first page, Professor X's use of the Americanism "gotten" has been changed to "got". Fair enough. And Iceman's "on the fly" has been Anglicised to "as they fly", which seems a bit strange to me. I didn't realise that was an expression that only Americans would use...
There are rather a lot of unnecessary changes to the dialogue, actually - a lot of the characters have a habit of droppin' the g at the end of words, and the Fantastic Annual restores it to some but not all of the speech bubbles. Iceman is allowed to keep doin' it, it's the bad guys who have their pronunciation fixed for the most part! But the best example of this editing comes on page 7, where Cyclops is investigating a newly-discovered mutant in the circus...
Naturally, "dollars" becomes "pounds", "clams" becomes "quid", and "bucks" becomes... "quid". A little unimaginative on the part of the British translator. But then the carnival barker (a phrase that was left unchanged) calls on Tex the cowboy to take centre stage. "Yes, sir! I'm ready!" he replies. Because the original "Yes suh! Ah'm ready!" couldn't possibly be allowed to stand, could it? Those British readers might have got the impression that this man called Tex, wearing a cowboy outfit, was some kind of American!
But Tex is definitely a local boy. The Angel confirms it on page 17, in the middle of the pitched battle between the X-Men and the circus freaks (who come out on top, impressively enough)...
"Spoken like a true son of the west, my friend! West Bromwich, that is!" The Angel's original reference to West Brooklyn has been quite brilliantly changed for the British audience. I think this is just perfect. Tex obviously sounds like a brummie in this alternate X-Men universe!
West Brom won the FA Cup in 1968 (and have never won a trophy since), but that was still in the future when this annual came out. Their latest achievement as at the publication date was losing the 1967 League Cup final to QPR. Tex was probably at Wembley for that historic first single-legged final and his meanness here obviously stems from disappointment at the result.
I'll have to write more about this annual at a later date. Why does the bottom left panel of the Fantastic page say "who" where the American version says "whom", for example? The British version doesn't look like it's been changed. Will I have to track down an original copy of X-Men #3 to check? Or might that just be taking it too far?
