Fantasy Masterpieces (MARVEL) Question...

[Roganjohn]

greetings everybody,
i'm new to the forum, but have collected comics on and off for some time (mostly older Australian comics), and have collected toys for about 10 years on and off too.

anyway, i have in my hands a copy of the 1965 Marvel 'Fantasy Masterpieces' by Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko etc etc. yeah i know -- 'big deal' i can hear you all think. however, instead of having a 12c price, this one has a small 10c sticker on the cover, which i guess i've gotta ask is a common thing or not.

the flood of them found on ebay at any time never show this sticker, and am just wondering if this has ever been seen before (or if so, how regularly?)

any help appreciated,
john

[Joe S. Walker]

Hey, FANTASY MASTERPIECES was a great read in its day - the first place I ever saw the pre-hero fantasy stories. I have a complete run (all 11 issues, 1966-68) and only the first two were 12c size, as from issue #3 it became a 25c mag and included Golden Age reprints (rather heavily altered from their original appearance, I've heard...) Anyway, by 1966 the standard comic book had been priced at 12c for several years. It could be that your copy picked up that sticker later on when some retailer was selling stuff off cheap.

[Cei-U!]

It could be that your copy picked up that sticker later on when some retailer was selling stuff off cheap.

I dimly recall seeing normally 12 cent comics marked even lower at some discount chainstore like Wig-Wam or Yardbirds as a kid. They had stickers over the suggested retail price printed on the covers.

Cei-U!
I summon the discount!

[Rob Allen]

I bought those 12-cent issues of Fantasy Masterpieces when they came out. I've never seen or heard of any priced at 10 cents. So I'd say the answer to your question is no, it is not a common thing.

[InfoBroker]

While I agree with Rob, that it is not a common thing, nor were there any major publisher approved 10 cent comics being sold on the newsracks of the States in the time frame of Fantasy Masterpieces #2, I can think of a couple of slightly hanky panky comics that made it into my collection way back then.

Credit for comics unsold were given to the distributors by them ripping the title portion of the cover from the comic and then destroying the remaining portion of the comic.

However during the summer of 1968, I received two copies of Astonish #32 that were heavily trimmed and missing the title portion of the cover. They were purchased by a friend of mine who made trips to India with his father every summer. So the route of these comics were from the States over the Oceans to India and then back again. They would have gotten there via a devious distributor who made a bulk sale of paper products to some bannana boat sailors at the expense of the Comic publishers footing the paper and printing bills.

I also have a completely coverless copy of New Gods #4 that I had to twist arms to get, because it had been pulled from the racks everywhere two weeks earlier. I spotted it somewhere that I really wasn's suppose to be. But given that I was getting back into comics again, and this was a Kirby crafted comic, and even though I was just a skinny teen-ager at the time, the wholesaler couldn't talk me out of purchasing it. I was not to be denied.

Not sure who's the greater guilty party here, but I'm pretty sure the statue of limitations has long ago run its course.

-jb the petty-larceny ib :cool: