Spider-Man Comics Weekly Vol 1

Spider-Man Comics Weekly, the second title published Marvel UK following a positive reaction to the debut of Mighty World of Marvel in October 1972, was launched on 17th February 1973. Spider-Man himself had already featured in the first 19 issues of MWOM and was the obvious choice to star in the fledgling British Marvel imprint's newest comic, with the Mighty Thor as his regular backup strip. Like MWOM, the comic was initially printed on cheap newsprint paper with some colour pages and some two tone pages but, also like MWOM, soon lost the colour but acquired glossy covers which it kept up until 1979 when it briefly reverted to newsprint covers again. A second backup strip, Iron Man, began in issue #50. From issue #158 onwards, SMCW merged with another weekly title, The Super-Heroes, which had been cancelled after 50 issues on 14th February 1976. The title was changed to 'Super Spider-Man with the Super-Heroes' and the format was changed to a 'landscape' one, with each page containing two pages of US Marvel material side by side at half their normal size in order to cram in more strips (a format also used for another weekly, The Titans. Reader reaction to this was mixed as it made the text very small and at times hard to read. Several new strips were included alongside the former three, including at various times the adventures of the original X-Men, The Invaders, Dr Strange, Tales of Asgard, Moon Knight, Marvel Two-in-One starring the Thing and Marvel Team-Up starring Spider-Man. From issue #199, with the departure of yet another weekly, the title became 'Super Spider-Man and the Titans', with Captain America and the Avengers joining the lineup; the Avengers would become one of the title's longest staying tenants. The landscape format was finally dropped with #229. With issue #231, the title changed again, to 'Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain', as Marvel's first short lived attempt at a title based on an original, UK based character (Captain Britain, of course) folded after 39 issues and the Captain's strip was incorporated into Spider-Man's pages along with the Fantastic Four. This was the first time the title had included any material not previously published in the US, though the Captain Britain strips were at this time not at their most memorable, with a constantly shifting creative team as whichever artist was available took it on for a few weeks. The original Captain Britain strips ended in #247, with #248-252 featuring a reprint of the two part Spider-Man and Captain Britain team up originally published in the US in Marvel Team-Up #65-66; after this, Captain Britain was dropped (replaced by Captain America) and the title became simply 'Super Spider-Man'.