Jesus I'd forgotten all about this. Basically, Marvel had - after an initial boom and bust - managed to produce a magazine based on Doctor Who; it had initially been more of a comic before they cottoned on that there was a lot of cheap mileage in articles about the show's history and the like, meaning only a handful of pages of comic strip needed to be commissioned each month. The decision to do the same thing for B7 from the start was therefore a no-brainer and the title debuted in autumn 1981 just as the new-look Season 4 hit screens. Brilliance, apart from the fact within a few issues the the cast were wiped out in a bloodbath and the series was cancelled, with the monthly presumably selling enough to amble on regardless. Same thing would happen with Doctor Who Magazine, which bridged a 17-year gap between the show being cancelled and that CBeebies shit with farting aliens arriving on the screen by surviving on a TV Movie and lots of interviews with minor guest stars. The difference was Who had a 26-year history to draw on, not to mention ongoing official fiction like the novel and audio series. Blake's 7 had four years, seemingly no rights to anything from the first three, and an official ending that saw everyone die.
Captain Britain was in danger of becoming a failure during the early 1980s. His original series had never quite caught on, largely through a succession of disinterested American creative teams unwilling or unable to move beyond stereotypical British characters, dialogue and settings; the much-trumpeted original Captain Britain comic was cancelled within nine months. The strip itself staggered on for a while in Super Spider-Man and Captain Britain with constantly shifting groups of Marvel US jobbers making the thing before that title too folded, merging with another title but leaving Captain Britain out of print.
Dave Thorpe's run on Captain Britain doesn't get a lot of good press, and in some ways, it's easy to see why. The strips were omitted from the Alan Moore/Alan Davis TPB despite their close connection and received wisdom goes along the lines that Thorpe's writing was so muddled and poor that Dez Skinn had to cancel one of Marvel UK's longest-running titles and bring in another writer in some attempt to sort the mess out. This isn't quite fair. Thorpe does display a lack of discipline and he's certainly not on the level of Moore, but the issues aren't especially confusing. That said having read the Moore material (which does give a more clear explanation for some of the events of Thorpe's run) so many times that it's hard to perceive what many readers found to be so baffling.
Adaptations are a funny thing and as far as I'm concerned The Rocketeer fits that bill. I'm wrong, I know, but sometimes things aren't that easy. The film version, starring Bill Campbell and Jennifer Connolly, was something I watched a great many times as a child and remains one of my favourite films. I didn't know there was a comic until much later, let alone that this was radical difference. Therefore, initially, the Eclipse 'album' (it's a TPB in large-format size, i.e. Eclipse's usual habit of being a bit pretentious, effortlessly combined with their other main characteristic of mucking up trades) of Dave Stevens' original batch of Rocketeer strips didn't go down too well. That it's the original canon can matter little when you're so much more familiar with the unfaithful adaptation.
