It’s not often that the news of the sale of the rights to a back catalogue gets a lot of comic people excited, but the news coming out of Oxford is doing the business this finest August day.
Rebellion, the company that currently own 2000AD have bought the rights to the Egmont UK archive. This includes all Fleetway characters created after 1970, so this includes all of Tornado and Tammy, but not all of Lion or Buster as any character created before 1970 belong to Time UK. A good breakdown has been provided by John Freeman here.
Most people, that’s anyone who doesn’t normally read my blog, will wonder why any comic fan should get excited about this. There are a few reasons why British comic fans are smiling about this and hopefully after reading this blog article, you might understand why.
First up, it means that there is a good chance that we will see characters from Battle, Misty or even Tammy resurrected and either reprinted or they may even get a new script and when that includes characters like Colonel Walter ‘Fighting’ Mann, then you have got to be excited about that prospect.
I doubt that it will be Fighting Mann as he has just been republished in Garth Ennis’ Battle Classics series as volume 2. My review is on Down The Tubes and the book is available in all good book shops from 23rd August 2016. But I am sure that you get the idea.
The other reason that I am quite excited about it is that Rebellion have also purchased the rights to Action. I have mentioned Action before but a current post by Bigmouthmag really gets into the nitty gritty of the issues with Action.
Now this is where it could get really interesting. Action was lobotomised in its’ prime. It was selling 180,000 issues a week but it was deemed too political and too radical by the establishment, so it was withdrawn from the market and every fan since then has bemoaned the loss of their comic. They are 50 something’s out there that still get misty eyed when they recall “their” Action.
So if a bit of research is done, I would love to see if the “lost” episodes of some of the stories could be recreated. I very much doubt that it would happen, but it is always something to wish for, isn’t it?
Imagine if we got to see the real finale to Death Game 1999 as Kruger exploded with bits of him everywhere?
Or if we got to see the gangs from Kids Rule OK take over the Tower of London and be King for a day.
These are just two reasons to be excited about this purchase by the Kingsley brothers.
And while I am having a bit of an Action kick, I would like to warn any Action fans that Moose Harris’ site sevenpenny nightmare has not been resurrected, but it has been taken over by what are at best described as scam artists. You can read the warnings here.
Moose and John Freeman have been in discussion and the data about Action is in the process of being transferred to Down The Tubes and I am excited about having all that information available online again.
nothingbutafan 