According to reports Disney/Marvel US have decreed that there will be no more UK originated Marvel work. (Original story at Bleeding Cool)

What a really short-sighted and stupid move. Granted Marvel UK hasn’t really been that influential in the last few years, but to completely cut off the possibility of something wonderful in the future just smacks of myopic stupidity.

If it hadn’t been for Marvel UK I may never really have fallen in love with comics the way I did. My first comic was a Marvel UK reprint of Herb Trimpe’s Hulk, but the thing that really, really hooked me for life was seeing Captain Britain for the first time. Alan Moore and Alan Davis’ Marvel UK work really did change my reading life. I was hooked for good. I wrote about the series here and said this:

“Captain Britain is the superhero I was in absolutely the perfect place at the right time to really get into. When I was but a young thing all I knew was that comics came from the newsagent. I used to get issues of Hulk Weekly, Captain America Weekly, Spider-Man Weekly every so often but never particularly fanatically. As I recall, it was summer 1982 and I was on one of those magical childhood holidays that we always remember – nothing but sun, sea and sand, no boredom, no arguing, ice-cream, toy soldiers and comic books all week – or at least that’s how I see it now. I picked up a copy of Marvel Superheroes 388 from some beachside newsagent. I can pretty categorically state that this one issue changed my life.”

And it’s true. It did change my life. Or at least my reading life. Who knows, if it wasn’t for that Marvel UK work I may have drifted out of comics at some point.

And now, thanks to a stupid decision by Disney/Marvel US, someone like me when I was younger may never get into comics. Short-sighted? Stupid? Bad business? All of those things? Definitely.

“AND enough of a fanboy to ask if I could keep the rubbish. This consisted of published pages mounted on card, over a hundred small 3×4 photos taken by the artist as reference (in the days before photocopiers or scanners) and a few scraps of original work.

I held on to the bits and pieces in the hope that they might be included in a book devoted to Frank Bellamy’s work. There have been attempts to publish a definitive volume but none have been successful. Now, almost twenty five years later, and with the world in recession, a book seems more of a remote possibility than ever. Compared to new images recorded and created in our digital age none of the source material I have is good, some is very poor but I believe it offers a unique and valuable insight to any true Frank Bellamy fan.

Thanks to Nancy Bellamy for giving me the two bags of studio debris, permission to use it here and for her time in relating anecdotes and tales of Frank’s life and career.”

So Alan has put a lot of this debris up online at his website….and what trash this is….. even the detritus of Bellamy’s studio looks gorgeous:

(Piece simply entitled Patel from the early work gallery)

(Detail from spread on moon landings that appeared in the Daily Mirror newspaper to commemorate the first moon landing.)

(Very familiar Tom Baker page, most likely from Radio Times.)

(Via Tom)

Well, thanks to a bit of miscommunication over Twitter, Mark Roberts, of the excellent Marvel UK centric blog “The Sword Is Drawn” got in touch and mentioned Night Raven in relation to a blog post he’d just written in regards to the possibility of Fred Van Lente using the character. And immediately I realised that it was a series that we’d missed off The Uncollecteds series.

Night Raven as a character comes from that golden dawn of Marvel UK when editors Dez Skinn and Richard Burton created the character. Initially drawn by first David Lloyd, then Steve Parkhouse and John Bolton as a 1930s pulp hero/vigilante type of strip, his timeline and history is, to be frank, a bit of an unwieldy mess. But no matter, continuity doesn’t matter when the stories are good. And they were consistently good, often great. There’s so much classic pulp noir stuff going on and a host of great writers and artists involved to tell the stories.

Subsequently, the character cropped up in a series of short prose stories by Alan Moore and later Jamie Delano, often illustrated by Alan Davis, that were, as I recall, absolute corkers.

(Night Raven as drawn by David Lloyd)

(Alan Davis illustration from an Alan Moore Night Raven prose story in Daredevils #7. Pic from Lew Stringer’s blog)

(Night Raven The Collected Stories, published 1991. Night Raven House Of Cards, published 1991. Fury/Black Widow, published 1995)

The only available way to get hold of Night Raven is through the back issue bins or second hand. Both Night Raven The Collected Stories (Parkhouse / Lloyd / Bolton) and the one off House Of Cards (Jamie Delano and  David Lloyd) feature 30s pulp Night Raven. Fury/Black Widow Death Duty pops up in back issue bins sometimes and the story is meant to give some sort of satisfying conclusion to the Night Raven mythos, but I honestly had never heard of it before. Others more knowledgeable than I would have to tell you whether it’s essential to the Night Raven collection I’d love to see – a definitive collection of all of the important Night Raven stories; comic and prose?

A full, very detailed character history can be found at The Appendix To The Handbook Of The Marvel Universe website.

But if you have no idea what the hell that means, may we suggest a quick purchase of Moore and Davis’ classic D.R. And Quinch for enlightenment and entertainment.

Brilliant use of the Keep Calm-O-Matic by Link Machine Go.

Oh yes, it is here. It may be a lot later than originally intended, but dammit, its worth the wait. Not to mention the weight – its a humungous tome, just remember when picking it up to lift from the legs and not your back. Alan Moore, Alan Davis, Captain Britain. Oh yes.