Crisis (Fleetway)

Crisis
Crisis #1 (September 1988), featuring an image by Carlos Ezquerra of Eve from Third World War
Publication information
Publisher	Fleetway
Schedule	Fortnightly (1-48) Monthly (49-63)
Format	Comics anthology
Publication date(s)	1988 - 1991
No. of issues	63, plus 2 specials
Editor(s)	Steve MacManus Michael W. Bennent

Crisis was a British comic book magazine published from 1988 to 1991 as an experiment by Fleetway to see if intelligent, mature, politically and socially aware comics were saleable in the United Kingdom. The comic was initially published fortnightly, and was one of the most visible components of the late-1980s British comics boom, along with Deadline, Revolver, and Toxic!.

Crisis was Fleetway's response to the success of Deadline. David Bishop, in his Thrill Power Overload, comments "2000 AD had once represented the cutting edge of British comics, but was now in danger of looking staid and old fashioned next to Deadline".

Conceived by editor Steve MacManus, Crisis would offer to make the work creator-owned, which might lead to the chance for royalties and greater copyright control, which was a departure from the way they had done business up until then. They also planned to turn the stories into American comic books which would sell better on the other side of the Atlantic, although ultimately only the first few titles got this treatment and the title moved to shorter stories after issue #14.

"The original concept was a superhero comic that could be sold in America" MacManus recalls. Each issue would feature two stories, both 14 pages long. It was planned to repackage these as individual monthlies for the US market.

As a 2000 AD spin-off, it was initially science fiction based. It began with two stories: Third World War, by Pat Mills and Carlos Ezquerra, extrapolated some of the effects of global capitalism on the developing world into the near future, as seen through the eyes of a group of young conscript "peace volunteer" soldiers; New Statesmen was a "realistic superhero" strip by John Smith and Jim Baikie. Third World War later moved on from developing world topics to minority issues within the UK and introduced two new artists, Sean Phillips and Duncan Fegredo, while Mills took on co-writers including Alan Mitchell and Malachy Coney.