Great Covers: Marvel Around The World 4

Just the same as the last three times: here’s a collection of the covers to more international editions of Marvel material that I’ve gathered over the years. These are often fascinating for how they’re colored or the manner in which the publishers used localized talent to do their own interpretations of the Marvel characters. So let’s see what we’ve got.

Let’s begin with another Australian edition of STRANGE TALES, one on which a local artist gave us his interpretations of a number of figures from within the story. Based on what we see here, I’m guessing that this issue reprints AVENGERS #1 in whole or in part. Look at how hairy the Hulk’s feet have gotten!

ADDITION: I’m told that the artist on this piece was Keith Chatto, who primarily did war and western pieces.

And here’s a slightly later issue on which the artist, Bramley, has signed his work. Thor is so surprised by Loki’s shocking attack here that he’s lost his pants!

Here’s a string of early Spider-Man issues reprinted in Spain in the very late 1960s with new covers, mostly based on either the American cover or else assorted interior art.

An absolutely crazy new X-MEN cover released in Brazil. If I’m not mistaken, this publisher actually produced one or two new stories of the X-Men for this run, one of which is illustrated by this image.

British Fleetway Marvel Annual for 1974 which feels as though it’s tapping more into the spirit of the 1967 Spidey cartoon series than the comic books somehow.

It was a pretty standard thing for the publishers who licensed the Marvel characters, particularly the ones who ran those adventures in black and white on the interiors, to make up their own color schemes for the covers. Here, Cap doesn’t fare too well, losing his sleeves as well as his leggings–an understandable mistake, really. His torso stripes also get run over in color. This was published in Serbia and Croatia back when they were Yugoslavia.

Here’s an old issue of SHAZAM featuring a special issue devoted to Namora, the Sub-Mariner’s cousin and sidekick in the late 1940s.

Because they’d routinely break the stories up into multiple parts, the British Marvel weeklies of the 1970s often got new covers done for them. This one features the Avengers’ first meeting with the Squadron Supreme, and makes me wonder whether Goliath is standing in a hole or what.

There was an attempt to publish the Marvel characters in Japan in the very early 1970s but it failed utterly–the style of storytelling was simply too alien to readers who had grown up with more cinematic manga approaches to comics. I do love the fact that Kobunsha didn’t bother to take out the English blurb, they simply pasted their logo right over it.

This Italian Spider-Man cover gained some notoriety and interest as it used the artwork to the cover of AMAZING SPIDER_MAN #35 the way Steve Ditko originally drew it, before editor Stan Lee had the Spider-Man figure redone by Jack Kirby.

Along those same lines, this printing of the cover to Wolverine’s first full appearance in INCREDIBLE HULK #181 was printed in England with the original uncorrected Hulk head that Herb Trimpe had handed in.

I dig this new cover painting for this Spanish issue containing early AVENGERS reprints.

This reprint of AVENGERS #2 gets almost everything right, but clearly nobody had good reference on Giant-Man’s color scheme, and they colored Iron Man in the style of his later red-and-gold armor.

Finally, the French series STRANGE reprinted Marvel work for years, often under wonderful new painted covers. This one’s a little bit more shocking somehow, and not just because the New Teen Titans are sharing space with the X-Men on it. Everybody’s just a little bit too glammed up on it.