Transworld Features & Marvel UK

The one thing that keeps me engaged in producing this blog, however infrequently that's been lately, is that its very existence can lead to serendipitous discoveries and contacts, which can help us fill the gaps in our collective knowledge about the history of Australian comic-book publishing. And my recent email exchanges with UK comics fan/researcher, Rob Kirby, is an excellent case in point.

Quite unbeknownst to me, Rob has, for the last two decades, been engaged in researching the history of Marvel Comics publishing operations in the UK, from the 1950s to the present-day. As he revealed in his recent email to me (received, quite literally, out of the blue), Rob had previously stumbled across Comics Down Under during his ongoing 'internet sweeps' for any titbits of information referring to Transworld Features, a US-based company which, as noted elsewhere on this blog, appeared to have connections with the post-war Australian comics publishing industry, dating as far back as the late 1950s. But as he reveals below, Rob didn't share his own insights about Transworld's UK operations (and its links with Marvel Comics), as he was still trying to 'fill in the blanks' of his own research. And, it appears, he's since largely been able to do so, after having established contact with a principal figure associated with the company, Ray Wergan (Again, read on for further details).

Rob hopes to publish his massive history, supported by copious indices to most of the Marvel Comics UK editions, in a forthcoming book, titled From Cents to Pence. In the meantime, Rob has very generously offered to share some of his insights into the Marvel Comics-Transworld 'connection' with readers of this blog. I think you'll agree this is fascinating reading, and helps flesh out our understanding of Transworld's links with Marvel Comics (US), as well as Transworld's connections with the Australian (and, by extension, British Commonwealth) comics publishing markets.

For the moment, Rob is currently without a dedicated online presence/website, but he has asked me to encourage any interested readers to contact him via the Make Mine Marvel UK group on Facebook. Alternately, readers can email any questions they might have for Rob directly to me (see my email address listed at right-hand side of this blog), and I will pass them on to him.

For readers' benefit, I have (where possible) added external website links to any key individuals, companies or comic-book publications mentioned in Rob's text, especially for those unfamiliar with the history of Marvel Comics' UK publishing ventures. - Kevin Patrick (Image courtesy MyComicShop.com)

Transworld - A Short History

By Rob Kirby

If any of you ever caught some of the latter issues of Dez Skinn’s long run on the late, lamented Comics International, then you may have seen my name crop up in relation to my now longer running research work on the history of Marvel UK . Or then again, maybe you might have spotted me on the Marvel UK group on Facebook, or mentions of my work else where on the web on It Came From Darkmoor and on Lew Stringer’s Blimey! blog. But if you haven’t…

Well, to be brief – which could be something of a first for me – I spent several years from around 1990 onwards gradually indexing almost everything the UK wing of Marvel published, new material and reprints alike. Initially just for me, so I could build up a want’s list of all the US stories that hadn’t appeared over here, and for any issues that were rather heavily edited for whatever reason. As I garnered more and more material it increasingly made sense that I should collect it as a reference work. I had form, having co-edited and designed the 1980s fanzine Amalgam.

Once I’d decided on making it into a proper to book, it had to have a brief history ahead of the indices to set the material in context, but while I could sketch out a basic structure easily enough, there seemed to be almost no research material out there to help me fill in the blanks. After abandoning a first attempt to write something I eventually came back to it around 1995 or so at the prompting of both Steve Holland and the aforementioned Mr. Skinn. But how to tackle it pre-internet, and before the resurgence of useful fan magazines like Comic Book Artist, Alter Ego and Back Issue et al?

Perhaps spurred by more recent interviews in the newsstand Comics World magazine (then being edited by the self-same Mr. Holland), I decided to take a trawl through my own small collection of 1980s fanzines. What I found completely amazed me. All the time I’d had a mini-treasure trove of useful historical material tucked quietly away in a corner, some 200 pages of it to be precise, and from that, and then later gaining access to more and more willing helpers from all corners of the comics industry (helped by the rise of the ‘net and letters in CBG etc.) I gradually began piecing together and then constantly feeding a rapaciously hungry, ever-growing history.

But, and this is the reason I’m writing this today (well, tonight UK time for me, actually!), the biggest mystery was how and why the UK wing started. ‘If only I could locate Ray Wergan’, I thought, the man who had responsibility for the 1970s British Marvel comics through his Transworld company, ‘then maybe I’d have some of my questions answered’. But the search proved fruitless, and I had no joy from the company he’d sold his press picture agency business too, and I must admit I’d feared that he might no longer be with us. Thankfully, that fear was groundless, after I found him quite by chance commenting on journalist photos as the lead quote in a Feedback column in The Times. Not only was he very happy to talk about his connection with Marvel’s UK business, but his memory of that period was still sharp, spurred on by the ten chapter extract I had to send him to fully cover the scope of his involvement with what became known as Marvel UK in later years.

Having caught the first part of your discussion here about the Australian Marvel reprints a while back when doing a search for anything Transworld-related, I thought that it might be useful to add some pertinent information to your own research. But I’m glad I didn’t have time to do so before now, because several months of conversation and questioning later, I have far more definitive answers to many gaping blanks.

But, of course I’ve now gleaned far, far too much material for this blog (and hey, I will have a book to sell in the very near future after all, snappily entitled "From Cents to Pence"), but you’ve done me a favour too; until last night I hadn’t realised that Al Landau later became Marvel President ahead of Jim Galton. I’m at a loss as to how I missed that mention in the interview you extracted, seeing as I buy Alter Ego regularly, but I thank you for making a very useful connection for me, as you’ll see from what follows… which I hope will be of some small interest to you.

Okay, so on to Transworld, already!

Part 2 of your fascinating feature is spot-on; Thomas and Lee are indeed discussing Marvel’s overseas syndication. But, just as I did with so little hard evidence to go on (in my mitigation), you’re very wrong in thinking that Transworld was just one company based in New York, just as I was equally wrong when I thought that it was solely London based! It was in fact two interlinked companies… eventually.

Transworld Feature Syndicate Inc. was originally formed in the late 1940s. Initially it syndicated U.S. material in Central and South America , but it seems that when Albert Landau joined his mother Ira’s business, he was keen to get in on the comics market scene too, even before its unforeseen major resurgence in the early 1960s. In transpires that Martin Goodman had been a client ever since the early 1950s, and so Transworld began handling the worldwide syndication of all Marvel’s present and back catalogue comic strips and artwork alongside materials from his separate magazine division, Magazine Management. But they didn’t stop at Marvel and also handled material from the American Comics Group, Tower Comics and Charlton, and probably several others too.

DC Comics had their own set-up, though. Through their IND distribution arm, they’d bought up Thorpe and Porter in 1964; a UK distributor handling U.S. comic imports (and a former reprint publisher). And when Warner Bros bought DC, T+P was then subsumed, along with Top Sellers and General Book Distribution (GBD), into Williams, which became DC’s publishing arm in Europe . Although I have no information to back it up, from what you’ve said here, it would seem that DC probably did handle their own syndication of material overseas, or at least hired a different agency to do that for them.

So, how does Ray Wergan slot into this story? Well, he trained as a sports reporter in 1957 and built a well-regarded reputation with his sports journalism in Manchester ’s Evening News and Chronicle (the newspaper later evolving into The Guardian) and also did a few guest spots in the national press too. After seeking fresh challenges at Thomson Newspapers in 1960, he was offered a U.S. post with The Daily Express newspaper’s New York office in 1961and it was here that he met up with Al Landau.

Wergan and Landau soon became firm friends and would regularly catch-up every time a home-sick Al returned from London, where he was now living in order to oversee Transworld’s new subsidiary European office. This coordinated other offices in various European territories. Of particular interest to readers of this blog, though, I’ve been told that both South Africa and Australia were handled by the London office (which makes sense given our historical links with those countries), although obviously the film was being sourced directly from New York . And from what you’ve said it seems they chose to operate under the generic Transworld Feature Syndicate name back then.

In 1964 Life magazine offered Wergan the chance to become their independent agent in London, provided he could find them an established agency that was already working in the news field, and this was how he came to manage the London offices of Transworld for Landau, bringing Life into a now rapidly expanding portfolio of top titles.

Landau happily left Wergan to run the London office in High Holborn in 1968 and returned home to New York for good, selling their London office to Ray in 1971 as part of company policy to make managers directly responsible for the profitability of their office. Now run in partnership with the central New York office, the London business was immediately renamed Transworld (UK) Ltd.

And as I write this I can see now that this all dovetails perfectly with the sale of Marvel to Perfect Film (later Cadence Industries) in 1968, leading to him becoming President there following Chip and Martin Goodman’s departure. And when Marvel reprints stopped following the end of Odhams’ reprint Power Comics line, and the company’s sale to I.P.C. magazines, this further explains why it was that Landau accompanied Lee to his London office in spring 1972 to rescue a failed attempt by a packaging company called Martspress the previous year to launch a new British Marvel comic of their own; a scheme that Marvel had provided considerable financial support for.

Lee was apparently unhappy with the feel of that still-born comic anyway – which would have repeated the same uncomfortable mix of traditional UK action/adventure strips alongside the far more kinetic U.S. material that Odhams had used – and he eventually re-worked the dummy first issue into something that could be completely controlled and assembled by Marvel. And it proves that Lee was far more involved in the day-to-day running and expansion of Marvel once he stepped down as writer/editor than he’s ever been given credit for before now.

Out of this came The Mighty World of Marvel, of course, and the birth of Marvel’s first overseas publishing division, originally registered under the name of Magazine Management. All they needed was a London office to add editorial material and to coordinate with advertisers, printers and promoters. Ray Wergan was asked to set everything in motion until a permanent manager was appointed, but this never happened and Wergan continued to oversee the work of five separate editors until Dez Skinn was given the task of running the whole operation from London in late 1978, which is where the Marvel UK name came into being thanks to a nifty new masthead (which remained in use long after Skinn’s departure).

Transworld (UK), meanwhile, continued as a picture syndication business until Wergan’s retirement in 1988, whereupon his image library was sold on to Scope Features, who continue to this day. Incidentally, I must stress that this would not have included any film from the Marvel period, as that was retained by Dez when they set-up office in Kentish Town , London . Images from prints of some of the UK covers from the 1970s continued to appear in letter columns until around 1982/3, and a later move saw almost everything skipped apart from a few things that were rescued by enterprising staff members. This was a short-sighted practice repeated during subsequent moves, and was common to almost all UK publishers anyway. It goes without saying that a lot of valuable film and artwork appears to have vanished for good.

I hope this clarifies things somewhat, although it sounds like you still have a bigger story yet to be told, so good luck in fitting it all together. My book, which will probably top out about 500/600 pages of text and copious illustrations and photos if all goes to plan, has taken me well over two decades to compile years of fruitless searching, but don’t let that put you off!

Good hunting!

Rob Kirby