Of Star Trek and Spider-Woman

Very busy of late — thoughts of getting Star Trek circulation history notes on the site to coincide with the film release ran into time constraints. There isn't much to be found in the Statements of Ownership, anyway, except for the single year in the late 1990s when Marvel had obtained the license for the second time. There should have been Statements in DC's first Star Trek series from the mid-1980s, as it ran long enough to have them and it was sold by subscription — but I can find none in going through most of the run. If anyone else finds them, let me know.

However, there are a couple of other updates here, including sales for April 1999, in advance of the April 2009 figures. And the complete Statement of Ownership record is now online for Spider-Woman, covering sales from 1979 to 1982.

Spun out of Marvel Spotlight, Spider-Woman was notable for very quickly spawning a cartoon series on ABC (starring the voice of Joan Van Ark!). I was surprised to find a Statement in its final year, as it had gone bimonthly and its cancellation was one of the more abrupt to be found in a Marvel series at that time. The final issue was a classic "Combat Kelly ending" in which the character not only died, but was magically made never to have existed — and there was no letters page, only a single unpunctuated line pasted onto the bottom of the final page of art announcing the cancellation. As I recall, the explanatory page describing the story behind that issue's photo cover wound up having to run over in Marvel Age, Marvel's house fan magazine.

(Fortunately for the character — not to mention later writers coping with continuity headaches — Spider-Woman's erasure from reality was later remedied in Avengers.)