Art For Art’s Sake #328: Looking Once More At All The Pretty Pictures

by Richard Bruton

Comic art time, as we take you through a little curated mix of the delights to be seen by fine purveyors of sequential art found online. Yep, it’s Art For Art’s Sake…

Death’s Head – High Noon – by Simon Furman and Bryan Hitch, the first appearance of the character, just a one page strip that appeared in the back of some Marvel UK comics in 1987 before the character then appeared in Furman’s Transformers UK comic at Marvel UK. So, why publish this one-off single page? Well, copyright…. over to Mark Roberts for the background…

“Death’s Head was created for Marvel UK by Simon Furman and Geoff Senior. Furman wanted to use the character in the stories he was doing for the UK Transformers comic. But the problem there was that if Death’s Head made his first official appearance in the pages of Transformers the from a copyright point of view he would be considered part of the Transformers universe, first and foremost. That would mean that as soon as Marvel ended it’s license agreement with Transformers Marvel UK would no longer be able to use the character (Or Marvel in general for that matter). Furthermore, any other company who picked it up, such as Dreamwave or IDW now, could potentially use the character in their own stories, as part of owning the license. Obviously, Marvel UK did not want this to happen.

And so in 1987 Marvel UK put out a one page strip called “High Noon Tex” in the back of some of its books. This story was published before Death’s Head’s Transformers debut, and therefore stamped Marvel UK’s possession on the character for continued use. And for those curious over what the strip looked like, well, here it is:”