OVERKILL - MARVEL UK'S FORGOTTEN TREASURE TROVE

Nostalgia does strange things to you, especially when you're prone to browsing Ebay for retro goodies to add to the backdrop for my YouTube channel. When I came across a wealth of issues of OVERKILL, the seemingly forgotten Marvel UK anthology comic from the early 1990s, a lot of happy memories came back. The thing is, while my memory has undoubtedly been coloured by nostalgia, the Overkill comics hold up well. 

Kicking off in April 1992, right in the comics boom prior to the speculator crash that plagued the later 90s scene, Overkill presented a revolving selection of strips, usually five per issue, covering science fiction, fantasy, superheroes and more. 

While very much a Marvel product, its darker, punky tone felt more akin to 2000AD rather than the core of Marvel product that audiences were used to.

In an attempt to connect the comic to the wider Marvel Universe, outside characters were brought in. death's Head, the bounty hunter who used to be in the backup strips in the UK Transformers comics in the eighties, came back as Death's Head II with a new look and even more attitude. He was used as something of a figurehead for Overkill for a while, with mixed results (but consistently entertaining results, nonetheless).

The core strips of the comic included Hell's Angel (soon to be renamed Dark Angel), Warheads, Knights of Pendragon, Digitek and the anarchic cyberpunk action of Motormouth and Killpower. The fully-painted artwork that graced Digitek made it stick out from the other strips like a sore thumb visually, but thematically it fit perfectly. 

For me as a fan from the start, the comic began to go off the rails with the inclusion of the X-men. I totally get it that Marvel UK wanted to get in on the action at the height of the X-Men's 90s explosion of popularity, but once they showed up in Overkill, it felt like the focus shifted from new and original characters to it just being a poor relation of the US X-titles. 

The X-men's appearances in Overkill were never seen as canon if I remember rightly (I may not, tbh), which to me made the rest of the Marvel UK characters also feel like they weren't canon either. I'd have preferred it if Xavier's merry mutants hadn't shown up at all. Overkill wasn't theirs, or at least that's how I felt at the time.

Overkill lasted 52 issues and ended in the summer of 1994. I miss finding out what was going to happen next to the strange yet compelling cast of characters that I'd grown to love. I find it a shame that those characters are largely forgotten now (despite their brief resurgence in marvel's 2014 Revolutionary War title) as I think audiences would get a kick out of them. 

I do recommend you check out some Overkill issues if you come across them, or at least check out some of the art from the title online. It may not have lasted the same as 2000AD, which it so desperately wanted to be, but for a time it did carve out its own unique niche in the market, and its own niche in my mind as a big influence.

But yeah, nostalgia does strange things.