VULCAN (1975)

In the 1970s many British strips owned by IPC were being translated and reprinted abroad via Syndication International in various foreign comics. Then someone had the idea of packaging an entire comic full of UK reprints that could be sold in Britain as well as Germany. The result was Vulcan, a co-production between Swiss publisher Gevacur and British publisher IPC, and printed in Germany.

Vulcan was a 32 page comic on cheap but glossy paper, half of its contents in full colour. An expensive format at the time, but made feasible because after doing the English language print run, the printer then changed the black plate for a translated version in German, and continued printing. The German edition was entitled Kobra, and was exactly the same as Vulcan except for the language.

The first issues of Vulcan and Kobra were published on the same day, February 22nd 1975. Perhaps IPC were unsure of its sales potential so Vulcan was only distributed in Scotland as a sort of test launch. It continued this way for 30 issues.

The contents of Vulcan featured reprints of some of the best adventure stories that had appeared in Fleetway comics of the 1960s. All the earliest episodes of Mytek the Mighty, Kelly's Eye, The Spider, The Trigan Empire, The Steel Claw, Saber: King of the Jungle, and Robot Archie. Actually, the four pages of Robot Archie were completely redrawn versions based on old scripts, including giving Archie's human pals longer hair to make them more contemporary. This may seem an unnecessary expense but perhaps it was because the original strips had already been reprinted overseas. 

Vulcan was smaller and differently proportioned than the original comics it took its material from. For the reprints, strips had to be resized to fit. Sometimes the resizing was subtle, but often not. Here's one of the slightly better results. First, the original page from Valiant dated 3rd April 1965...

...then the resized reprint from Vulcan 27th September 1975...

It seems that Vulcan had sold well enough in Scotland to warrant a relaunch across the UK. Readers South of the border had no idea that this Scottish comic existed, so all the serials in the comic had to conclude in the final Scottish edition dated 20th September 1975. Brand new endings were drawn to wrap up the reprints in a hasty manner!  

New ending for Reg Bunn's The Spider drawn by Joe Colquhoun...

New ending for Jesus Blasco's The Steel Claw drawn by John Stokes...

New ending for Solano Lopez' Kelly's Eye drawn by John Stokes...

The following week saw a fresh start with a new Vulcan No.1, published on 20th September 1975, reprinting stories that had not appeared in the Scottish edition. For once, the cover was brand new (a smashing Mike Western job) rather than enlarging an interior panel for the cover as was the norm. For those of us living in England, this was a new comic, and we were totally unaware it had already been running for 30 weeks in Scotland!

Mike Western also drew a new cover for issue 2 of the new series...

One attraction of Vulcan was that it featured 8 full colour pages of The Trigan Empire every week. The pages were edited and resized from Ranger and Look and Learn but Don Lawrence's artwork was still superb.

Unfortunately, Vulcan didn't fare too well as a national comic. With the 28th issue (No.58 including the Scottish series) came this announcement...

Final issue of Vulcan.

The following week, the first Valiant and Vulcan appeared on 3rd April 1976 with this Carlos Ezquerra cover.

The problem with Valiant absorbing a reprint comic was that most of the stories had previously appeared in Valiant several years before. The solution was to edit and wind up the reprints as quickly as possible by presenting Vulcan as a pull-out 'mini-mag' - four normal pages for readers to fold into an 8 page comic...

The cheap newsprint of Valiant did the reduced reprints no favours at all...

After just three weeks, the stories were concluded and the Vulcan mini-mag was dropped, although the comic was still Valiant and Vulcan on the masthead for a while longer.

In Germany, Kobra had been more successful, and ran for three years in all.

Vulcan was an odd experiment by IPC. It was good to see such classic material collected into one comic, but the presentation often let it down. I'm not sure newsagents knew where to stock it, as due to its small format (close to American comic book size) some put it in the spinner racks with Marvel and DC titles. I think it must have been on firm sale because I remember several different issues hanging around those spinner racks for months. 

For some insight into Vulcan's history there's a short piece by Dez Skinn over on the Down the Tubes website: http://downthetubes.net/?p=78

All scans from my collection except for the Kobra cover which is from the Comic Vine website: http://www.comicvine.com/kobra-7507/4000-332710/

Below: The free gift that appeared in the Scottish Vulcan No.1 (from my collection):