don’t let anyone tell you overseas reprints of silver age marvel comics are worth looking at. 1970s UK marvel comics may technically have contained odds + ends of otherwise unavailable steranko + starlin artwork but even that was more or less uniformly terrible
most (all?) of the additional artwork is unsigned + the artists were very seldom identified anywhere in the mag, + whoever decided which original art required alteration also operated anonymously. the most detailed explanation of who made which editorial decisions + where appears in Spider-Man Comics Weekly 16 in response to a reader’s letter asking if stan travels to the UK to edit it
‘stan … supervises … in the united states working with a handful of dedicated bullpen buddies. we select the stories, make corrections if necessary … under stan’s watchful guidance. the whole comic is then sent to britain where our equally dedicated london stalwarts go over it, making any corrections that slipped by their american partners’
that is still keeping it vague
based on the evidence of the following attempts to update the image of the president the reason none of these people received a credit for their work may have been because they preferred to disassociate themselves from it
the famous journey into mystery 96 ‘defying the magic of mad merlin’ scene with president kennedy is redrawn in SMCW 14 with nixon in his place
(c) marvel 1973
+ The Mighty World of Marvel 37 features the same artist doing the same thing, this time all over gil kane’s artwork for tales to astonish 88’s ‘boomerang and the brute’ story
now you see lyndon b johnson
(c) marvel 1967
now you don’t
(c) marvel 1973
at this point I’m going to mention if anyone reading this is interested in really minute detail about alterations occurring in MWOM the grand comic book database
https://www.comics.org/issue/334843/
is likely to have them listed, although note this does not appear to apply to SMCW (the entry for SMCW 14 https://www.comics.org/issue/334920/? has no information at all on it at the time of writing)
the last + worst eg to which I’m going to draw your attention is in MWOM 34 which reprints ‘defeated by doctor doom’ from FF 17. someone has apparently just put an enormous profile shot of richard nixon’s nose into it
(c) marvel 1973
we may never know who was responsible for this because it’s obviously not something anyone would normally put their signature to unless they had been completely off their face while they were drawing it + thought they were being hysterically funny. the reasoning behind the nose is presumably because in the original it was a shot of kennedy’s hairstyle: if you want to see what the two JFK images referred to in this article were supposed to look like follow the link below
https://ogatoalfarrabista.wordpress.com/2013/11/26/in-memorian/
to a portuguese site which I think states it’s supposed to be about cats
note these UK reprints with nixon added were published in may + jun 1973. from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal
that was a few months after they’d convicted the watergate burglars but about a year before impeaching the president
afterword a
readers’ letters about marvel comics were featured earlier on this site in an article which read between the lines of the responses to them
in the light of what we have just seen, the reply quoted above to that reader’s enquiry about the editorial process would perhaps have been more accurate if it had read
‘stan … can’t possibly have okayed this … in the united states. we scrawl over the work of great sequential artists … unnecessarily … despite stan’s watchful guidance. the whole comic is then sent to britain where our equally talentless london stalwarts go over it, cocking up additional things that slipped by their american partners’
some of us grew up reading the version with the nose
sheesh
afterword b
the site on the link below
describes the relationship in the 70s between the fictional captain america + the real president nixon, mentioning as it goes cap 169’s ‘Committee to Regain America’s Principles’, which spells ‘C.R.A.P.’, with a scan of the relevant page
alectrenchcomics 
Actually, they weren’t ‘leaving it vague’ at all. That early letter reply you cite is absolutely factually correct.
Perhaps because no one had – at least until I was daft enough to (!!) – previously researched the origins of the Marvel’s UK division, and how it all operated, there’s been an awful lot of conjecture about various aspects of those comics – such as why they even wanted to do their own UK comics in the first place – some of which is, shall we say, a little wide of the mark. Therefore, there are a few myths and misunderstandings lurking out there on the web that my book will shed new light on. It’s called From Cents to Pence! and will be edited by Dez Skinn. I hope to finish the final writing this year, personal life allowing, so keep checking my creative projects blog over at: https://a-distant-beacon.blogspot.com/
While I agree that the art changes made in the UK weeklies were not always the most subtle ones, or indeed always really necessary, there were reasons these were made, so I hope the following will provide some useful context to this.
For one thing, what they were doing in the UK weeklies was actually no different from later reprints in their own series of US colour reprint comics, where it was quite common for changes to be made such as an update of US presidents, or costume changes – particularly with regards to female dress in the romance strips (the later Young Romance Pocket Book over here, occasionally ran both versions, so that one issue might contain the original 1950s strip, with another then printing the art corrected 1960s version).
Changes in the UK comics, besides trying to keep up with whoever the present day US President was, usually revolved more around alterations to hide continuity problems (where something being referred to, or shown, had not yet been published over here), less-welcome censorship of more adult series (such as Black Panther and Shang Chi), which had various changes made to them, as it was felt – not without justification – that the bulk of their audience were new, younger readers and not the more ‘hardcore’, slightly older comic fans and collectors. There was also retooling of the communist era stories, that Lee later felt uncomfortable about, so that they took place in the fictitious Bodavia instead – this latter concept was all Tony Isabella’s work (and he reused the country in a few of own US stories later on too) 😉
It’s certainly true that, just as on the US reprint books, there was no attempt made to credit those doing the hard graft of art changes and those dialogue revisions to UK English, both of which were indeed done in the dedicated UK Bullpen in New York, and on occasion also in the London office – when the pages for any given weekly were received – later under Alan Murray’s oversight of their small design studio. And equally, for much of the new artwork produced for recap pages and posters, although some of the latter was signed. With the internet and contact with the artistic community, a fellow researcher has now been able to very accurately tabulate a high percentage of who did what, at least with regards to the new covers, recap pages and posters.
The exact hands behind minor changes could be any number of people mentioned in the book on either side of the Atlantic, and some surprising people were involved. However, there was really no intention I can see that people wanted to disassociate themselves with the work – certainly no one has made such a confession to me, amongst those I’ve spoken to. As with all the last-minute art correction done on the US books, this was also simply seen as necessary additional production work that needed completing, nothing more nor less.
So, I can’t agree with the article’s concluding, albeit jokingly, rewrite of that letter page comment, because like it or not, what was going on with the UK books did indeed happen directly under Stan and Sol’s supervision – and, indeed, this was one of the reasons that Sol had been enticed back to Marvel. In fact, if not for Stan there would have been no MWOM et al. anyway, and perhaps a generation of readers may not have been turned onto Marvel thanks to the continued patchy distribution of the US comics, and therefore never progressed into the next wave of comic creators – their names litter many of the letter pages and art competition entrant lists.
And actually, far from cocking it up, London sometimes caught errors in the original US material. More importantly, we were often given first dibs on an awful lot more material than just the exclusive covers and poster pages, with some stories containing more pages in some stories than American readers ever saw (!!)… and I’m not just referring to the additional Star Wars stories that most people are aware of now, as other strip material was also being produced specifically to keep the British comics filled with content. It should also be noted that without the British dept. in NY, there would have been precious little opportunity for a whole host of young talents to get some training before they moved on to the US comics – from Starlin and Hunt to Nasser and Marshall Rogers, amongst a huge list of other artists ranging from Carl Potts to Jeff Aclin. Once production shifted to Dez in London it’s my contention that they had to invent a new department to continue that training, through the more formal programme Romita’s Raiders.
As evidenced by the many visits that Stan made to the UK, at least until Dez took over, and from what I’ve since been told by those he worked with, he was heavily involved with the huge amount of collaboration between London and NY on all aspects of the comics, with some very surprising revelations. You’ll have to wait for the book for those, I’m afraid 😉
Oh, and it wasn’t Peta doing the art corrections, by the way – she found someone else to do that for a short while. The London editor’s role, to start with, was more of a scheduling and co-ordination one, with NY and the printers etc. Later editors, such as Neil Tennant, took things much further of course! Besides interrogating both Dez and his over-seeing predecessor Ray Wergan at length, amongst many others, I’ve also spoken to Peta Skingley (her real name back then), Maureen (Matt) Softley, Alan Murray and even Mr. Tennant himself only a few years back.
Anyway, apologies for the length of this. I hope it sheds a little light on the creation of the early UK weeklies 🙂
Rob
Pingback: Marvel UK rarities, including “Dracula Lives” No. 1 cover, offered in latest Excalibur comics auction – downthetubes.net