Day Seventy: Death's Head Revisited

Readers of a certain age, which age being between about 30 and about 25, and who are geographically UK-based, already know what this entry is about. They're already looking forward to mentions of Spratt and Dogbolter and praying I skip over the Minion stuff. They're feeling quite nostalgic, too.

Let's go back a step, though, for our international cousins and those in the audience who didn't have the jolly good luck to be readers of Marvel UK's Transformers comic at the time. Back in the late 1980s, Marvel UK were publishing their giant robot car comic on a weekly basis, and were required to create stories which weren't reprints of the US material in order to cope with the differences in publishing schedules on each side of the Atlantic. One of the characters created for the UK version by writer Simon Furman was a horn-headed robot bounty hunter with a variety of interchangeable weapon hands and a verbal tic which involved saying "yes?" at the ends of sentences. This character was called Death's Head, and once introduced, his popularity soon became apparent to the staff at Marvel. He very quickly became one of the most popular characters in the strip, and this gave Marvel UK a problem. If they were to give the readers what they wanted, the Transformers would become supporting characters in their own comic. However, if they just removed him entirely, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot.

A fairly simple solution presented itself: give Death's Head his own comic. Take him out of the Transformers mileu entirely, but keep him doing the stuff he's been doing, namely reeling off hard-boiled bons mots while killing shmucks for money. Marvel UK had just started following their US cousins' lead and producing original (non-licenced) comics in the smaller format of the US versions, beginning with the Thunderdomey team book Dragon's Claws. This was a fairly standard 2000AD-style concept about murderous sports and the squads that played them, and was set in a run-down version of the year 8162 that owed a lot to the Mos Eisley school of civic planning. Death's Head was plucked from the Transformers universe and deposited in the Dragon's Claws one, and (after being introduced to new readers in the pages of Dragon's Claws itself) he began a run of his own book.

Hard. Core.

Death's Head soon started to build his own supporting cast, including characters like Spratt, the technician who rebuilt him and who demanded that in return he be allowed to accompany Death's Head as his partner. Death's Head reluctantly agreed, and so gained some comic relief to take the edge off some of the more brutal action. They found themselves offices, so they could have loaded dames come in and give them cases to take on, and they got involved with gang warfare, crime bosses with names like The Undertaker and Dead Cert (whose face was decidedly equine) and rival hired killers. As bounty hunters - sorry, "freelance peacekeeping agents" - go, Death's Head has to rank up there as one of the coolest.

One of the other great things about Death's Head is that he can be used to create a sort of Grand Unified Theory of nerd-dom. Marvel threw around all sorts of guff about parallel universes and so on, but given that Death's Head has, in his career, interacted with the Transformers, Doctor Who and Marvel characters such as the Fantastic Four, a case can very easily be made that all these things are in continuity with each other. Anyone who ever spent any time having their He-Man toys fight their Action Force ones, or who wanted to see an episode of Knight Rider where he teamed up with the A-Team, Airwolf and Streethawk, has an inkling of how satisfying it is to know that all your favourite fictional characters do actually have the potential to interact with each other.

Look mate, you're blocking my driveway.

Panini (the current owners of Marvel UK) have just begun republishing some of the classic Marvel UK material in trade paperback, beginning with a collection of Chris Claremont's early Captain Britain stories. As part of this programme, they've also released the first of two books reprinting all of Death's Head's post-Transformers appearances (plus the one-page strip which featured his first appearance, thus ensuring that - as a character who was otherwise going to make his first appearance as a Transformers supporting character - it would be Marvel rather than Hasbro who would own the character). They're a little rough and ready these days, and the reproduction quality isn't fantastic, but the fact that volume one goes all the way up to issue seven (of ten) of Death's Head's own comic would imply that the second  volume is likely to contain such material as the graphic novel The Body in Question, which tells Death's Head's origin and is a perennial eBay fortunemaker, as well as the assorted Marvel US appearances which he made around that time. It's worth getting if only to see the last time Marvel UK tried to create an original science-fiction universe that wasn't slavishly tied into the mainstream Marvel Comics continuity. It's a SF romp with plenty of action and a distinctly British sense of humour; that's something that has to be worth a look, yes?