Appearing chiefly during the years 1967 and 1968, the Power Comics line consisted of five weekly titles: Wham!, Smash!, Pow!, Fantastic and Terrific.

Under his direction, Bart (a pen-name for Eagle's Bob Bartholemew) and Cos were the staff editors who handled the individual titles.

[citation needed] When Odhams obtained the rights to reprint Marvel Comics material in the UK, they began by incorporating superhero stories such as the Hulk and the Fantastic Four into their existing titles Smash!

The Marvel material was reproduced in black-and-white and serialised in short installments alongside the original British strips which still dominated the content of those comics.

was similar in format to the two earlier comics, a mixture of traditional British material and Marvel reprints — in this case Spider-Man and Nick Fury.

In many ways, it looked more like one of the American black-and-white anthology magazines of the time, such as Creepy and Eerie, than a traditional British comic such as The Beano.

The content of Fantastic was dominated by the Marvel Comics superheroes Thor, the X-Men, and Iron Man, with only a minimal amount of British material.

The number of Power Comics titles was increased to five on 8 April 1967 with the first appearance of Terrific, which was similar in format to Fantastic and was again dominated by Marvel reprint material: The Avengers, Doctor Strange, and the Sub-Mariner.

Odhams' parent, IPC Magazines, was eager to shed the licensing fee expenses for their American reprints, so as each title in the Power Comics line shut down, its respective superhero strips were given up.

Only in the case of Fantastic, where the existing contract with Marvel had some months to run, were those strips transferred to its replacement, the merged Smash!

By introducing a new cover feature, new strips, and free gifts (in the style of established IPC titles such as Lion and Valiant), Smash!

The first superhero strip to appear in a (future) Power Comic title was the Incredible Hulk, who showed up in Smash!

The Fantastic Four eventually became the longest running Marvel strip, ultimately appearing in three Power Comics titles in succession.

Dialogue and/or images were also changed occasionally to remove snags in continuity caused by the lack of synchronisation between reprints of different storylines.

For the first few weeks of the Marvel reprints the company was not acknowledged at all, but Odhams then had a change of heart and published a letter from a reader pointing out the origin of the strips.

But, throughout, Marvel credit boxes containing the names of Stan Lee and collaborators such as Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby were invariably deleted from the splash pages; the space they occupied was either left blank or covered with drawn-in artwork.

Apart from the compulsory copyright acknowledgment in small print, the name "Marvel" was never mentioned — wherever it appeared in the strips it was changed to "Power".

For example, when the Hulk was removed from Smash!, the editors had to justify the decision by admitting the reprints had caught up with the American originals.

It has been suggested[8] that it was common practice for a publisher to quickly clone a successful title, in order to forestall its competitors from doing so, but that does not seem to have been Odhams' strategy.

The actual cause of the closures lies in the unexpected nature of the economic crisis of 1968 that hit the British economy, resulting in the devaluation of the Pound.

Increasing the cover price of the Power Comics titles to compensate was impossible because of stiff competition (with sales on a sharp downward spiral, as circulation fell victim to the ever-increasing popularity of television); so the fall in the value of Sterling made the American strips unaffordable.

In contrast, the comics The Dandy and The Beano published by rival DC Thomson, sold at a cover price of 3d.

In fact the page-count jumped overnight from 24 to 36 pages (a fifty per cent increase), with a consequent sharp rise in production costs, and so a marked decline in profit-per-copy.

The recently created Smash and Pow lost its Daredevil and Spider-Man strips, which together had comprised a full third of each 24-page issue, but now had to accommodate both Thor and Fantastic Four from the discontinued titles, plus a whole slew of new British adventure strips (which were being added in preparation for the comic's impending transition to solely British content).

IPC "bit the bullet" and increased the page count, at a single bound, by fifty per cent – a necessity if they were to achieve their intention of reproducing with Smash!

Under those conditions the Power Comics were effectively competing with each other – a factor IPC were certainly aware of, as the letters pages in Smash!

Standard industry practice was to close a comic or magazine if its revenues dipped towards the break-even point; publishers did not wait for a title to actually incur losses.

The closures represented a major cost-cutting exercise, reducing the ongoing production costs on the Power Comics line by four-fifths.

As for actual losses incurred due to the sudden and unexpected nature of the problem, and the inability to quickly terminate the long-term licensing contracts with the Americans, Smash!