Christmas Comics: THE MIGHTY WORLD OF MARVEL (1972)

From the very early days of Marvel UK here's the 13th issue of their first comic, The Mighty World of Marvel. Back then they were competing with traditional UK comics such as Tiger and Hotspur and MWOM had its own British "feel" in that it was printed on matt paper with white margins to the covers and spot colour on the strips. This issue even featured that old British comic tradition, the Christmas Greeting... but sadly no snow on the logo.

As most of you know, Mighty World of Marvel was (and still is) stuffed with American Marvel reprint, but the early issues featured brand new covers specially drawn for the UK. In this case the cover above is by Jim Starlin, inked by Joe Sinnott, who worked together on several early MWOM covers.

I doubt that the youthful-looking Stan Lee actually wrote that Christmas message below but it does the job, and plugs the Marvel Annual too (which was actually published by IPC, who previously had the Marvel license when they were running Marvel strips in TV21).


Other than the centre pages shown here, that issue of MWOM didn't carry any other Christmas material. Coincidentally, the issue of The Fantastic Four it reprinted (issue 6 of FF, from 1962) was the same issue that the Christmas 1966 issue of Wham! had reprinted, exactly six years earlier. I always liked that story as it featured the first team-up of Doctor Doom and the Sub-Mariner. Here's a bizarre scene from that issue in all it's cheapo green-hued glory featuring Sub-Mariner leaping into space shouting "Go! Go! Go!" Forgive 'em, it was the sixties!