Death's Head (1988)

Death's Head (1988) was a 1988 American comic book-style series published by Marvel Comics UK. It featured the exploits of a robotic mercenary character named Death's Head. The first of the Marvel titles to bear the name Death's Head, it is sometimes imprecisely called Death's Head I for casual clarity, even though it is technically the only Death's Head title to bear the indicia name of simply Death's Head.

As Doctor Who Magazine was a Marvel UK publication, the Doctor was treated, in that era, as a part of the wider Marvel continuity. This manifested in the titular character of the DWM comic story Keepsake facing off against Death's Head in one of the stories, and in the Seventh Doctor himself guest-starring in another. Most importantly, the vulture introduced in Keepsake became a recurring part of the greater Death's Head cast in the series.

Additionally, modified versions of the rest of this run were reprinted in The Incomplete Death's Head with an original framing device which presented these stories as records in an archive created by Hob following the events of Time Bomb!, thus contextualising them all within the DWU.

Title history
Created by Simon Furman, Death's Head had debuted in the Marvel UK series and then made his way into the Doctor Who Magazine strip, as well as the prefiguring, which led immediately to this solo title.

Death's Head (1988) ran for ten issues, then ended on a cliffhanger due to Marvel US' decision to radically curtail Marvel UK's activities. Despite the reduction in UK-based creative staff, the storyline of this series was resolved in a Marvel UK graphic novel called Death's Head: The Body in Question.

The 1993 series The Incomplete Death's Head reprinted all the stories from the 1988 Death's Head comic series, alongside stories featuring the character from other publications such as Doctor Who Magazine, ', ', and  to create a more complete account of the character. It remained "incomplete" due to the lack of Transformers stories, which Marvel had since lost the licence for.

Stories
All stories printed in the Death's Head series are valid sources on Tardis Wiki. However, most of the stories are only valid through their reprints featured in The Incomplete Death's Head. Stories which are valid for their first publication will have their issue page linked.