I just can't stand it when good things happen to people I used to love

As we're very near the 32nd anniversary of the publication of the first issue of Marvel UK's War Cars, I thought I'd dig out my old issues to see if they were as bloody terrible as I remembered - oh sorry, anniversaries are supposed to be celebratory, aren't they?  Well when you're anniversarying a 32 year-old UK comic based on toys that in the end were never released outside Asia, maybe that just isn't possible, The Internet.
Although to be entirely fair, it's not without some positive attributes - the paper stock is not as bad as I thought it would be, and the staples are still intact after all these years.

The toys themselves had no background mythology or context for any supposed conflict or tension that would force the blue team (sports cars that transformed into robots) and the red team (dune buggies that transformed into spiders) to fight each other, so the holes had to be filled in by Marvel editorial staff and writers on the fly, who apparantly took some box art of the teams racing against a background of a nuclear explosion literally and made the story about a series of races across a post-apocalyptic Earth, so it's like Hunger Games, if Hunger Games had Transformers in it and was also Death Race.

It may surprise you to learn that there's not very much on the internet about a comic from three decades ago that no-one bought or gave a poop about, but apparently the franchise was originally called Car Wars to cash in on the cultural cache of the Star Wars name.  It was quickly retitled War Cars, however, to avoid the litigation that nearly befell the theatrically-released pilot of Battlestar Galactica (which all good nerds will know was originally called "Star Worlds" before hastily having "Saga of" added to the title to foil Lucas' vicious legal department), though the change came too late for the UK manufacturers of the toys, who had the name emblazoned on everything from box art to sticker albums, all of which had to be dumped in an English coalmine by Stadium UK, the licence-holder for the toys in the western market who went bankrupt shortly after, leaving Marvel to sell a comic based on toys no-one had heard of and most likely never would.  The villains being referred to as "reds" (in reference to the colour of their vehicles) was not unnoticed by then-popular communist Arthur Scargill (if you're under 30 and reading this, he was sort of the Russell Brand of his day), and - on top of a coalmine being closed down specifically to be used as landfill space for the toys - was taken as evidence of a campaign against trade unions, prompting him to denounce the comic in a newsletter that caused the book to be boycotted by working class families across the UK, leading to the only moment in popular culture when War Cars actually entered the mainstream, after Ben Elton made a joke that more copies of the comic were burned in the street by angry adults than were bought by joyful children.

To put it mildly, War Cars was not a hit, and copies of the comic are so rare that they often go for stupid prices on eBay.  Seriously - 32 pounds for this?  The effing thing's got dog ears and someone's already done the word search and maze puzzles, not to mention some kid's coloured-in the illustrations for the text story.

Scanned from a copy described on eBay as "near mint condition" - MY ASS - this is the first episode of the strip as it appeared in the comic, not just a whopping 4 pages of original content exclusive to the UK market, but in colour, too, so Marvel UK were clearly planning on War Cars being a major title to have made this much effort.  The reprint material typical of the time that pads out the rest of the book is stuff like Killraven and an adaptation of Planet of the Apes by European writer/artist Ernő Zórád - that was probably reprinted dozens of times in the English market by that point - which keeps the post-apocalyptic theme going, alongside overly-aggressive editorial input from the (presumably fictional) "Sargent Wheels", who despised "the reds" and seemed to be some kind of talking scooter, just in case you ever forgot it was the 1980s.
I'll see if I can dig out some more issues to scan in later blog posts, as I am pretty sure I have at the very least got all the episodes of the first story arc to hand.  I imagine it's something we can all look forward to.

New ROMance

I never read ROM as a kid, primarily because there weren't a whole bunch of options as regards reading comics in 1980-1990s Northern Ireland, as generally we got glimpses of the broader Marvel line (or Marvel 'universe') through back-up strips appearing as filler in localised iterations of tie-in titles like Transformers, Star Wars, Action Force or Thundercats. Usually, these filler strips were chopped down from their native American-format of 22 pages per chapter to four 5-6 page chunks and printed after the title strip/strips (that were usually written by the likes of Dan Abnett or Simon Furman) based on toys or cartoon shows.
Through these bite-sized chunks I came to know the likes of Rocket Raccoon, Power Pack, and Iron Man 2020, and got occasional hints as to what were the 'big noises' in the broader Marvel U - everyone mentioned the X-Men (though I only knew them from an appearance in an episode of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends), and Spidey was a given, but there were hints at stuff going on in unlikely-sounding titles like Alpha Flight, and editors' notes helpfully explained that I needed to have read something called 'Rom the Spaceknight', to understand what sequence of events unfolded to the point that the child heroes of Power Pack could visit the New York aquarium and see giant space-serpents hanging around in the tanks.
Anyway, life - by which I mean the discovery of the fibromuscular tube leading from the base of the uterus to the exterior of the female body - got in the way of comics and these things dropped out of my brain for a bit until I discovered the internet and its oddly-positive attitude to borderline illiteracy in the feline blogging community. While perusing the blogosphere surrounding comics, I came across a fondness for the adventures of Rom, whose bear-punching, hooker-frying, small-town-incinerating escapades had secured for him a place in the hearts of many, long after the death of his comic series in 1987.

Written by Bill Mantlo and drawn by Sal Buscema, ROM was the tale of a cyborg spaceman battling shape-changing alien witches called the Dire Wraiths, and his adventures often involved him incinerating said extraterrestrial infiltrators while they were still in human form, giving him an in-universe reputation as an unstoppable alien serial-murderer. It was this wacky undercurrent - and the angular, anguished human faces of his victims twisted in agonised horror as he sent them from this plane with a blast from his Neutraliser - that sticks in the mind now his adventures can be enjoyed thanks to the actions of evil internet pirates who have scanned every issue and made them available to a generation otherwise unable to acquire reprints now that the rights have lapsed from Marvel's stable of licenced properties.

I'm currently reading my way through the original run, and so far it's got a lot more depth to it than a comic about a toy deserves, but then that was always a feature of Marvel's licenced titles, particularly the Transformers UK work of Simon Furman, which was deep enough that elements eventually found their way into the 2007 movie based on the toys, such as the Allspark/Creation Matrix McGuffin, an eons-spanning intergalactic war, and epileptic camerawork ruining perfectly good SFX shots with poor visual storytelling.

Rom has mittens, too - I don't know why, but this actually makes him more terrifying, as if the bear-punching, killer plant-wrestling, space-hopping, planet-busting, mutant-smashing, hooker-burning escapades weren't enough to make him super-awesome aplenty. I'm enjoying this unabashedly 1980s creation thoroughly thus far, and lament the lack of reprints of the series, however easily-acquired the scans of the book may be online. My one impression from it so far seems to be that while my memories of the 1980s were of a horrid decade, there were more than a few bright sparks in popular culture for children.