Senior/Furman's Marvel UK Originals C/D

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I say Classic. I still miss Death's Head and Dragon's Claws and drag out my here-and-there collection copies for nostalgia purposes. So totally 1992, but also totally better than the Transformers work even though that wasn't bad by any stretch. I'm probably one of the few folks who became enamored with Senior's hard-edges style in Dragon's Claws FIRST before I discovered issues of the Marvel UK Transformers in some store lying around.

Death's Head II is of course atrocious. I haven't seen the 3rd iteration at all yet and don't really intend to.

― TOMBOT, Tuesday, 14 March 2006 20:17 (twenty years ago)

Regression is all good.

Did Furman write DHII? I know he's writing III (which / who / what has the honor of being in the final issue of the newest flabtabulous incarnation of Amazing Fantasy) (along with, IIRC, MARK HAZZARD: MERC).

― David R. (popshots75`), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 20:23 (twenty years ago)

OMG CONFESSION: High School Me thought DHI looked stoopid, and thought DHII was ultramegahott on the hologram tip. High School Me also bought issues of Wild Thing & Mys-Tech Wars. But not Motormouth & Killpower. Standards, y'see.

― David R. (popshots75`), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 20:33 (twenty years ago)

See also: Marvel UK -- C/D?

― Chuck_Tatum (Chuck_Tatum), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 21:07 (twenty years ago)

Blimey, that new Death's Head series in Amazing is poor. (Not that I expected otherwise, but really.)

― Chuck_Tatum (Chuck_Tatum), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 21:10 (twenty years ago)

Abnett & Lanning did DHII (puttup!). Furman came back for the Death Metal series (really, don't ask), but that's about all he wrote during the MyS-TECH era of Marvel UK.

I loved Death's Head, but my local shop never got Dragon's Teeth/Claws. Still, I prefer his TF:UK work overall - the Wreckers! Killing off Prime! Again! And Again! Nightbeat in a forty-foot-high trenchcoat! Zombie Impactor! *sniff*

― carson dial (carson dial), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 22:52 (twenty years ago)

Was never too impressed with DH1, but DHII was fantastic. I remember reading MyS-TECH for a bit, but kind of gave up on it after a while.

― Stone Monkey (Stone Monkey), Wednesday, 15 March 2006 12:05 (twenty years ago)

I think one of the great things about the senior/furman death's head strips is that there's this great perfunctory quality in the way Geoff Senior illustrates violence, no motion lines, maybe one or two stray dots to indicate the loosened particles wafting in the air, just as if someone had taken a cel-shaded high-speed photograph of the exact moment 23 milliseconds after the punch landed, everything frozen in space; what this does, for me, is accentuate Death's Head's machine accuracy, the utter familiarity of combat to him, etc. blah blah blah; it also avoids turning the fights into page after page of faux-exciting BLAST BLAST BLAST as you might see in, say, an issue of Cable or something similar. DHII comes to mind, actually, as an example of why Senior is better at Death's Head. Or anything set in the year 8162, for that matter.

― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 15 March 2006 15:27 (twenty years ago)

The whole second issue of DHII where he's on that incredibly stupid planet where they banned robots and guns after some insipid war, and everything is medieval, but with rogue cyborgs, is one of the stupidest pieces of comicry I've ever bought, second only to the Frank Miller issue of SPAWN where some hot bitch gets killed by a ridiculous weapon and our man Simmons goes on a tear and teleports himself inside some steroid-addled idiot's gut and blows him up from the inside, god, remembering that is giving me Brain Damage.

― TOMBOT, Wednesday, 15 March 2006 15:30 (twenty years ago)

Stupid question time: why didn't they just keep/revive the old character?

― Chuck_Tatum (Chuck_Tatum), Wednesday, 15 March 2006 15:42 (twenty years ago)

I'm probably one of the few folks who became enamored with Senior's hard-edges style in Dragon's Claws FIRST... So totally 1992

Same here actually! (Although it's really so totally 1988.) Kids at my school would actually RUN with excitement if someone came in with the new Dragon's Claws issue.

― Chuck_Tatum (Chuck_Tatum), Wednesday, 15 March 2006 16:15 (twenty years ago)

I loved both Dragons Claws and Deaths Head at the time. Especially the crossover in Deaths Head issue 2 or 3. I knew Senior's work mainly from Action Force, where he did a lot of covers (his specialty were big closeups of the marquee characters - Storm Shadow, Snake Eyes etc) and then I started getting into Transformers too. What happened to him?

The last thing I saw was the Deaths Head GN which I think I've got somewhere. It seemed somehow wrong when Deaths Head started appearing in actual American Marvel Universe titles like Fantastic Four. As if Desperate Dan would be next...

Strange also to think that the first issue of Deaths Head has Brian Hitch art. But then I remember his work on an early Action Force too. They mentioned - probably in the letters page - that he was only 17 at the time...a little prologue or epilogue to the first G.I. Joe silent story...

― David N (David N.), Thursday, 16 March 2006 01:40 (twenty years ago)

twenty years pass...

Tom Ewing is doing a series on bluesky about comic book crossover events which has just got to Marvel UK's MYS-TECH WARS and reminded me how much I love mk 1 Death's Head, surely the greatest British comic book character of the last 50 years that didn't come from the 2000ad stable (some of the characters from Viz are the only real competition I can think of?)

Geoff Senoir's design is so good, the face reminds me of an old animated cartoon character in the way it manages to balance simplicity and expressiveness. It's also simple and striking enougth that a child can draw it and peroduce something that looks recognisably like the character, which I think is an important quality for a comic character, I definitely drew him a lot as a kid.

He's not diagetically British and I don't particularly imagine him as speaking with a British accent (I kind of imagine the voice as being somewhere between Darth Vader and Sam the Eagle from the Muppets) but I think there's something about his peevishness and prickliness that feels specifically British. The mixture of self-importance with a stiffness and complete lack of imagination or sensitivity puts him in line with a long list of UK sitcome characters, the insistance on being called a freelance peacekeeping agent rather than a bounty hunter is essentially the Bucket/Bouquet joke from Keeping Up Appearances. He's a fussy character.

― Platinum Penguin Pavilion (soref), Sunday, 26 April 2026 10:47 (one week ago)

I was obsessesed with Death's Head since his introduction and indeed got pretty good at drawing him but I guess only up to The Body In Question origin story as I'd never even heard of Mys-Tech Wars til now.

― nashwan, Sunday, 26 April 2026 13:12 (one week ago)

Love him! Had a bedroom poster that came as insert in (iirc) Dragon’s Claws I remember buying the old Marvel UK singles from the newsagent as they came out. A great UK comics market at the time - Dragon’s Claws and Pendragon, Oink, Dredd, Zenith, Crisis, Marshall Law, Bogie Man, Viz, reprints of Batman, Animal Man, JLI and Punisher… I still feel vaguely betrayed whenever i saw a drawing of Death’s Head II.

― Chuck_Tatum, Monday, 27 April 2026 23:45 (one week ago)

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