Back-up strips
You are the editor of Marvel UK's brand new Transformers comic. You need to run the US issues in smaller chunks, in order to keep a fortnightly (later weekly) frequency without running out of stuff. But... what are you going to run in the rest of the comic? Features alone won't grab the kiddies! You need more strip! You need...
Back-up strips!
A great way of padding out the comic while not taking the mick, back-up strips ran throughout the entire Marvel UK run. These would almost always be reprints of other Marvel titles. The two exceptions were the in-house humour strips: Mike Kazybrid created the early Matt and the Cat and Chromobots, but it's Lew Stringer's Robo-Capers and Combat Colin that lasted the longest and are best remembered.
Things were a bit desperate in the early days: while Machine Man (#1-42) was a logical choice ("these kids like robots, right?"), it was soon followed and co-existed with Planet Terry (#16-27). This was a strip from Marvel's Star Comics imprint, pitched at a younger audience than Transformers, and has an extremely bad reputation in UK Transformers fandom. Following Machine Man, we got a sensible replacement with Iron Man (#43-50) and Robotix (#51-54); then the no-sense-at-all Rocket Raccoon (#55-69) and Hercules (#70-85); a return to robots and armour with Spitfire and the Troubleshooters (#86-99), a Spider-Man Annual with Iron Man 2020 under the title Iron Man 2020 (#119-125), and Iron Man again (#126-129, #146-152).
Rather bizarrely, in the final issues (#309 onwards), Machine Man came back. The same Machine Man strips.
Other Hasbro-based comics would soon end up as back-up strips. The first was Action Force: an altered reprint of GI Joe #44 was run as marketing for the new Action Force comic (#99-102). . Then, the comic reprinted [[The Inhumanoids|the short-lived The Inhumanoids) (#103-118). After Action Force was cancelled, it was merged with Transformers from #153, giving it a permanent run of G.I. Joe reprints to use until it was dumped in #305. This would be briefly interrupted by a merger with Visionaries, covering #183-190 and #213-219.
From #130 to #145, the comic ran the Headmasters miniseries as a back-up strip, giving it cover-to-cover Transformers strip. From #221, it began using reprints of UK strips as handy padding when it was in danger of catching up with the US issues; it then did this permanently from #290 until the end.
Panini's Armada and Titan's movie series comic have both used the same tactic, Panini with original Transformer strips, and Titan with IDW reprints and unused Transformers Animated]] strips (and one new one).
