I have never hidden the fact the Rebellion Studio handled the use of old adventure characters badly with The Vigilant (to clarify things Valiant They Were was my (copyrighted) title for the series I wrote and drew and it was not titled The Vigilant)) since they told everyone that these were much loved British comic characters still fond in the memories of many UK comic fans.
So, as is typical of companies who do this, they made the characters awful and almost American comic book characters with a story that was shaky at best. Why on Earth would you make The Steel Commando (a robot) suffer from post traumatic stress disorder so that it can wantonly kill people on rampages? Had the writers ever seen a Steel Commando story? Why kill off one of the most iconic characters in the shape of Adam Eterno in the first issue and basically as a quick cameo? Also, the writers did not know much about Eterno since he could only be killed by gold (part of his curse) yet some Nazi robot(?) kills him with a sword not made from gold.
Again, the Leopard from Lime Street is another iconic character and rather than put him in his traditional and well recognised costume they put him in what I can only describe as a mess.
This may all have been done for one reason; copyright. You see UK titles were copyrighted but not the characters in them because that would be spending a lot of money on "throw away entertainment" and I was shocked to learn that some of the weekly titles were not even copyrighted! A character was created and appeared in one title but a few years later might appear in another title. Also, after each sell off Amalgamated Press-IPC-Fleetway-Maxwell PP etc etc the creators were not paid for re-use and I only found out in 1999 after a conversation with Gil Page the then Managing Editor at Fleetway (his career with the company spanned 45 years) that IPC were not interested in comics based on legal advice and that Fleetways own board of directors were hesitant on old characters (Gil told me that they had a warehouse full of material he would have loved o use but was told "No") because a creator could "follow the American trend and sue over copyright. Making characters slightly different would cover them.
Or they just couldn't be bothered and let the creative team on the book do what they wanted.
I have some of the trades of the old Fleetway/IPC/AP strips and they can vary from excellent to not so great in reproduction -something pointed out in an Amazon review of The Steel Commando book. But Rebellion has a huge number of characters that if handled properly could well be successful and it astonishes me (not really) that all we got were reprint books and The Vigilant. There is no backbone or guts behind pushing new material it seems and therein lies the problem.
The same could be said of D. C. Thomson (Dundee Editions) where the directors appear to have decided that "comics are dead" in the 198os (as per an interview with one on The Money Programme on BBC 2 back in 1985). It has such an incredible catalogue of characters that with the proper driving force could be successful. I was told that after Leo Baxendale sued Thomson succesfully6 in the 1980s the spectre of lawsuits and paying out put the frighteners on them. Don Lawrence had already fallen out with Fleetway/IPC over the lack of payment for foreign reprints and there were legal threats so....
A note; I only found out when interviewing some British creators in the 1990s/early 2000s that they were unaware that the strips they created/worked on were widely published outside the UK. I know that two reached a settlement with Fleetway but creators rights were then a thing and publishers could get as nasty as they wanted but the law was with those creators.
According to His Majesty's Copyright Office (the final word on copyright) on a quick search they could find no comic characters copyrighted other than Dan Dare, Billy Bunter and Judge Dredd.
All of that aside why can the UK not have a comics industry? A lot of UK creators go to the United States and that saved the American comic industry (as declared by top people at Marvel and DC in the 1980s) but they went to work on U.S. comics because they were paid considerably more than in the UK. Alan Moore for instance would have been paid the same amount as I was which was £35 per printed page -you could write a 6 page script but if the strip was actually 3 pages in length you were paid £105 while the artist for b&w art per page got £135-140. You can see why writers loved working for the U.S.!
We have the artists. We have the writers and yet no one uses them -Thomson only uses artists as they want them and then payment is not that great. The UK is, to be honest, dead when it comes to comics and yet smaller European companies have better industries.
This will never change because who is going to invest in comic publishing in the UK? Our main publishing is the small press and that is pretty depressing when you think that Cinebook Ltd successfully publish English language reprints of French comic albums.
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