Death’s Head 2 V1 (1992)

After the initial Death’s Head stories ceased publication, the character was revamped for inclusion in Marvel UK’s next wave of titles, where it became the company’s biggest ever exported seller.

There were plans in 1991 to bring back the original Death’s Head, which would have featured the character on trial and facing the death penalty, and flashing back to how he’d got there. Early into production the new editor Paul Neary scrapped it and commissioned Death’s Head II instead: replacing the character with a new version, created by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, and Liam Sharp. In an autumn 1992 interview with Comic World, Neary was dismissive about the original character and the aborted : “I didn’t like the pages that had been produced – I didn’t think there was much future in Transformers-style robots and I thought we could do an awful lot better.” He produced some sample sketches of how he wanted the character to look,and Liam Sharp’s take gave the project “a kickstart”. Ironically, the success of Death’s Head II meant Neary was ordered to create more titles and the easiest way was to reprint the original series (“The Incomplete Death’s Head”); editor John Freeman had to talk him into it.

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