UK reprints of 'This Man, This Monster'

[Godwin28]

Hi all,

Wonder if anyone has any information on which UK reprint publications
in the early to mid-70s might have included the FF story 'This Man, This
Monster', and in colour?

Someone with a decent collection of UK Marvel / Marvel Superheroes / FF
annuals says that he can't find it in any of them -- the hardback publications
which reprinted various stories from the original comics -- some available
to view at http://tonystrading.co.uk/galleries/index-annuals-scifi.htm.

Wonder what the other options might be?

Thanks.

[T GUy]

I would have thought that it'd be reprinted in The Mighty World of Marvel, probably just after No. 100. That'd be in late 1974, I'd guesstimate.

[Godwin28]

I've also just found something online: 'The Complete Fantastic Four' series,
published in the UK between '77 and '78 ... large format reprints. Might be
worth investigating ...

Thanks for the tip on MWOM -- forgot about that!

[Simon Garth]

MWOM wouldn't have been in colour though - even the spot colour was long gone by then, if I remember rightly.

Might have been in one of the pre-UK Marvel comics like Fantastic or Terrific, but can't really help there - only ever saw about 3 issues of them

[Allan Harvey]

I've also just found something online: 'The Complete Fantastic Four' series,
published in the UK between '77 and '78 ... large format reprints. Might be
worth investigating ...

Thanks for the tip on MWOM -- forgot about that!

It wouldn't have been in the Complete Fantastic Four comic as that reprinted stuff from the post-Kirby Buscema era. The 'complete' part merely referred to the fact that a whole US comic was reprinted per issue, rather than being cut into serialised chunks.

MWOM would almost certainly have reprinted "This Man This Monster". There was also a series of Fantatic Four Pocketbooks in the early 80s that reprinted the series from the start, iirc. In black and white, though. I doubt the story was ever reprinted here in colour, unless it was in one of the Marvel Annuals in the 70s.

[Joe S. Walker]

I'm sure it wasn't reprinted in the 60s "Power Comics" - their FF reprints didn't go that far, stopping at the Sue and Reed wedding story from Annual #3, which appeared in the final issues* of Smash, itself the last surviving title in the Power line.

*Or to be more exact, the final few before it was relaunched as a standard Fleetway/IPC style British comic, with almost all its previous features dropped. In that form it ran for another couple of years. I remember a rather dismissive editorial in one issue saying that some people had written in asking what had happened to the "super-heroes", but they weren't coming back and that was that.

[Godwin28]

Ahh, I've found it, after a tip on another forum from the artist Lew Stringer --

It was the 1969 UK publication called 'Fantastic Four', subtitled "a full colour
comic album," published by World Distributors.

Apparently the artwork was sent over from the States in black & white,
and then coloured by folk who'd never seen the original comics!

Hence, the costumes were red & yellow, Thing was purple, and the Human
Torch was blue when he was flamed-on.

The issue contained three stories: This Man .. This Monster, The Way it
Began, and The Peril & the Power.

I knew I wasn't dreaming! Just took me 35 years to figure out what it was ...

Very weird as well -- that story had such a big impact on me at age 7,
and I didn't know until researching online recently that it's considered
a classic.

[Simon Garth]

My god, I remember having something like that - it had an old Sub Mariner story ("Sufferin' Shad!" era - he fell down something and - wouldn't you just know it - wings grew out of his ankles and suddenly he could fly!) and some other really old stuff, along with something a bit more modern.

Can't remember anything else about it, at the moment, but I can vaguely remember the format of the cover..

[Aaron Kashtan]

My god, I remember having something like that - it had an old Sub Mariner story ("Sufferin' Shad!" era - he fell down something and - wouldn't you just know it - wings grew out of his ankles and suddenly he could fly!) and some other really old stuff, along with something a bit more modern.

Can't remember anything else about it, at the moment, but I can vaguely remember the format of the cover..

You're not thinking of Les Daniels's coffee-table book Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics, are you? That book reprinted both "This Man... This Monster" and a Bill Everett Subby story, along with half of Amazing Spider-Man #2 and a Wolverine story.

[Simon Garth]

No, this was waaaaay before Wolverine ever existing - mid-late 60s, at a guess.