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Just for fun, here's a little mystery for you to work out. It's not a mystery to me 'cos I know the answer, but let's see if you can explain it. I own two copies of the above SMASH! Annual for 1975 (issued in '74), which was the second-last one for the comic that had been merged into VALIANT in 1971. Below are two versions of three panels from inside the book, one from each of my two copies.
Forget the variation in the spot colour - that's simply down to the vagaries of printing and is quite common. As you can see though, the first panel in each row is slightly different. Can you come up with a possible explanation for it? Put your thinking caps on, Criv-ites, and give it a go!
And now - the answer: But first, this post has had a good many hits, but so far only two comments. Surely imagination isn't as rare as all that?
Anyway, the answer is simple, as all answers are when you know them. The first Annual I bought was price-clipped, which meant the strip on the other side of the page had a bit missing. It wasn't even a neat diagonal cut, but rather, as the price had been enclosed in a circle, it was almost a square (with a round edge) that was missing.
I added a patch, but as I didn't know what the missing piece of art looked like (not yet having bought my second copy), I just drew what I thought it might look like. I 'cheated' a little for this post by upping the contrast so that the join wasn't visible, but if I'd left it in, it would've been pointless asking the question. (Whaddya mean you want a refund?)