It's got a very Iron Giant vibe, for sure. It was part of Marvel's teen-skewing Tsunami line (which also gave us Runaways), and the intention was to do stories that were a little bit more about emotional stakes than big supervillain fights. Plus, Sean McKeever writes great teen stories. It's worth checking out!

(That said, it's mainly worth checking out so that you can move on to the fantastic Avengers Arena series he appears in, which is Teen Heroes Battle Royale. It's surprisingly good.)

"Teen-skewing Tsunami line"!?

Found this little gem today, and the artwork is sharp. Is this Tsunami Line?

I don't think it was? It's maybe part of the same mindset the Tsunami line had. There was a period in the early/mid-2000s where manga was blowing up in the bookstores (also, there were bookstores) and Marvel was struggling to compete. They ended up reaching out to some manga and manga-ish artists to try and benefit from that trend. It mostly didn't work (folks want superheroes from Marvel, generally), but it led to some interesting comics. One of my favorites from that era was Wolverine: Snikt, from the artist behind Blame!

Tsunami was part of the same appeal, where the graphic novels were sized to match the stuff Viz and Tokyopop were releasing, but it was all either preexisting Marvel characters (Human Torch, Venom) or new characters in the Marvel Universe (Runaways, Sentinel).

The "Marvelscope" format, man, that takes me back! They did a few of those landscape-format issues, and they were a pain in the ass to shelve. There was a New X-Men one that was fun, but I don't think anything else ever bubbled up.

Not all winners from that era, but the staff was sincerely trying to broaden their market.

Found this at an antique shop and figured it was an older series, but "Codename: Genetix" isn't a name on Marvel's official website insofar as I can tell!

Note: Sorry about the bad rotation! I fix that in my phone's gallery, but inputting it as an attachment apparently keeps the original orientation.

Oh, man, Marvel UK comics. They were pretty bad! It's a lot of very Extreme characters, and really nothing that Marvel's going to want to acknowledge nowadays. (Genetix as a team does get a Wikipedia entry, though!) The only stuff that really carried over into the main Marvel line was Death's Head II (which eventually reverted to the much more popular Death's Head) and maybe Motormouth.

The bigger deal for the Marvel UK line was that it brought in a bunch of super-talented artists, most of whom would go on to do mainline American superhero books. Off the top of my head, that imprint gave us Gary Frank, Bryan Hitch, Liam Sharp... probably a bunch of others, too. Good line for generating talent, bad line for quality characters.

Oh, I overlooked that "Marvel UK" aspect!

What was so "bad" about them though?

"Bad" was maybe a kneejerk for me. I don't... I don't have very fond memories of a lot of those kinds of comics. There was a point in the early-90s, when Image was hitting it big, that every company massively overproduced, and a lot of books that barely had a reason to exist got released. Marvel in particular...

So, Marvel was losing market share in the early-90s to Image and a bunch of smaller publishers. They were still dominant, but each month they were a little less dominant. Marvel decided that the way to compete was to basically pull the oxygen out of the room. They figured that retailers, when ordering their comics for the month, would order Marvel first, Image second, DC third, everyone else last. So if Marvel could eat up more of the stores' monthly budget, there'd be less orders for other companies' books. Since they couldn't necessarily get more sales for existing titles (that's really hard to do), the easiest thing would be to release a ton of new comics. Ghost Rider's popular? How about a whole line of Ghost Rider comics? How about some books full of random short stories for 4x the cover price? Marvel UK was another big push to get a ton of books on the shelves that didn't really have a strong reason to exist, and were only there because Marvel felt like retailers (and, to a lesser extent, fans) would order anything Marvel put out, and do it in huge numbers.

Basically, they're books that were only made to crowd other publishers off of the shelves. In a more content-driven marketplace, they'd probably never have been released.

That said! I'm sure there's some value to be had in the stories. Like I said, a bunch of really good artists cut their teeth on the Marvel UK characters, so that alone gives them some validation. The stories and characters aren't really to my taste (they're all a very 90s flavor of violent and intense that I find faintly embarrassing nowadays), but that's a totally subjective evaluation. I probably should'nt've said "bad"!

You successfully explained a crucial aspect of Marvel's "business" model during the comics hell of the '90s, so I'm not gonna nitpick too heavily!

And I was a tad wrong, as Marvel's official website does mention the Genetix team if only in passing: https://www.marvel.com/teams-and-groups/mys-tech

Also, that Genetix issue advertised a few other things towards the back!