On Friday night, I spent a fabulous couple of hours at Southampton Airport. I recommend the experience to anyone whose life is just too darned exciting. Southampton's departure lounge is marginally bigger than my front room, and contains the following delights: a microscopic bar, a television (News 24, muted), two web terminals (broken) and a shop.

As my will to live ebbed away, I wandered the shop and stumbled upon a copy of the UK's SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL for 2003. For the benefit of American readers, annuals are a rather different proposition over here. In America, they are slightly larger-than-usual comics, generally featuring stories that would never have been published were there not a pressing need to fill up those empty pages. In Britain, they have roughly the same page count, but come in hardback format, and are used as Christmas presents for young children.

I picked up the annual out of curiosity to see what long-forgotten reprint had been dredged up this year. The answer was, in fact, none of them. The annual contained no comics at all. It was a prose adaptation of the film in nice large print. In fact, it wasn't even published by Marvel UK. It was a sad moment. I then moved on to the duty free section.

Marvel UK is, to all intents and purposes, dead. It would be a stretch to say this was a tragedy. Still, Marvel UK got me into comics in the first place, so I still care.

These days, what remains of Marvel UK - now a subsidiary of Panini - continues to produce monthly reprint comics, allowing British readers without access to comics stores to enjoy the X-MEN and AVENGERS stories of around three years ago. As Panini, they still produce DR WHO MAGAZINE, a monthly magazine for fans of the long-defunct TV series, which runs a few pages of comics per issue. Otherwise, Marvel UK's original commissioning seems to have finally ground to a halt.

'Captain Britain was not by any stretch of the imagination a good character.' But from the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties, Marvel UK produced plenty of its own comics. Conventional wisdom has it that Marvel UK's output was mostly just a historical curio. And this is largely true. Out of twenty years of comics, the only Marvel UK publications set for an afterlife in trade paperback are the last few years of CAPTAIN BRITAIN, and a plethora of TRANSFORMERS stories (published under licence by Titan).

Marvel UK's original comics fell into broadly three types. Their first attempt was original superhero comics for the UK market. In itself, not a completely absurd idea. It could be argued that there was a gap in the market there. In practice, it meant CAPTAIN BRITAIN, a strip which debuted in 1976 and whose total impact on the British popular consciousness can be summed up with the words "none whatsoever."

Captain Britain was not by any stretch of the imagination a good character. He was a cookie-cutter duplicate of Captain America, presumably created on the assumption that the patriotic hero concept could be happily transplanted to any nation in the western world. Of course, it doesn't work like that. Finding these early Captain Britain stories is not easy - even the National Library of Scotland (who should have received free copies) doesn't have them. I have a few, reprinted in a Captain Britain annual from the late seventies, which I found in a charity shop. They're not quite as appalling as they're sometimes made out to be - but they are extremely mediocre. "Generic" would be the kindest word.

Of course, in the tail-end of his Marvel UK history (before he was assimilated into EXCALIBUR and became a Marvel US character), some decent stories were squeezed out of Captain Britain. Not that Marvel did a great deal to publicise them. The first I heard of CAPTAIN BRITAIN MONTHLY - which carried the Delano/Davis run - was in 1986, when a notice appeared in TRANSFORMERS advising that the title had been cancelled.

'Marvel UK had a surprising degree of success doing toy spin-offs.' Marvel UK did a little better with their toy licences. They had TRANSFORMERS, obviously, and did a much better job with it than the parent company ever managed. They had ACTION FORCE, the UK version of GI JOE (it was a multinational force over here, for obvious commercial reasons). Both of these books had to face the problem that they had to produce home-grown stories to fit into the American reprints, even though they had no idea what direction the Americans were going in, and the Americans certainly weren't paying any attention to them. Even so, taken on their own terms, they were both successful series - they told decent stories with unpromising source material.

They also managed to get a surprisingly readable series out of the Zoids, who co-headlined the ludicrous-sounding SPIDER-MAN AND ZOIDS weekly. You remember the Zoids. Little clockwork spider things. You were supposed to build them yourself, so that made them very slightly educational. Broke if you looked at them funny. Not yet eligible for nostalgia. Grant Morrison wrote the strip for a while, and I suspect that if I actually read it again, I would be very disappointed. Fortunately, I threw out all my copies of that series years ago, and I can continue to delude myself that it was a lost classic.

Marvel UK had a surprising degree of success doing toy spin-offs, largely by taking them deadly seriously and writing, if not for adults, then at least for intelligent kids. TRANSFORMERS ran for 332 issues in the UK, as well, so they must have been on to something.

If Marvel UK had stuck to what they were good at then they might be more fondly remembered. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line they decided that it would be a good idea to start producing American-format comics and try to crack the US market. Things started off okay. DEATH'S HEAD and KNIGHTS OF PENDRAGON were quite good, distinctive comics.

And then Marvel UK decided to really go for it, unleashing a wave of comics onto the US market. In terms of volume and scale of disaster, this one is up there with the New Universe.

A common misapprehension among American readers is that the Marvel UK comics that appeared in the mid-nineties were imports. They weren't. They were just for you. In fact, Marvel UK tried to prevent those issues being imported back into the UK, because they wanted to run half the stories - and only half - in their reprint book OVERKILL. They were going to miss out the half of each issue that featured Marvel US characters as guest stars.

'What's frustrating is that some of the concepts really weren't bad.' I'll just run through that again. Marvel UK commissioned writers to produce a series in which every issue featured a US guest star in a prominent role taking up half the issue which was, nonetheless, severable from the plot.

And people wonder why the line was such a dismal failure. By the way, eventually Marvel reached a compromise about importing the full stories into the UK - it was allowed, but only if the comics were in sealed bags with stickers encouraging us to buy OVERKILL instead.

What's frustrating about the Marvel UK line was that some of the concepts really weren't bad. It seemed to be aiming for a line that was halfway between American superhero comics and the more diverse UK action comics. Take WARHEADS, a book about the henchmen of a supervillain organisation. It's not a bad idea. It could have worked. Or MOTORMOUTH AND KILLPOWER, in which a perpetually swearing teenage girl with magic trainers toured alternate realities accompanied by a genetically engineered assassin with a mental age of six. Totally ridiculous, and played correctly, it could have worked.

Unfortunately, they took the worst of 1990s superhero comics - endless guest stars and crossovers, ridiculous spin-offs from series that nobody cared about to start with. (DEATH METAL, for christ's sake.) Plus, most of the comics were dreadful. There's no getting around that.

Marvel UK's been a reprint stable ever since the plug was deservedly pulled on that line a few years back. And it's difficult for me to justify missing them on any grounds other than nostalgia. After all, the CAPTAIN BRITAIN and TRANSFORMERS stories are going to stay in print, and nobody's going to much miss the remainder. Still, they had Bryan Hitch, Gary Frank and Carlos Pacheco. They did have, for a while, Alan Moore, Jamie Delano and Alan Davis. And for a while, they made some very good children's comics.

It's better than a lot of publishers can say, isn't it?

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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