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| Copyright MARVEL COMICS |
Back in the '80s Marvel Tales was a great wee mag. The reason being it started reprinting the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man strips in sequence from the very beginning - along with covers - which made it a very nice catch indeed. Sure, some covers were slightly amended (even flipped) to accommodate the barcode box, but that would've gone largely unnoticed unless one owned the original '60s mags to compare them against. A mere 41 issues later the saga was complete - or around three-and-a-half years, time-wise - with the series then continuing with the Lee/Romita strips (covers not shown here) without missing a beat.
The title was first published in 1964 and came to an end in 1994 after 30 years - not a bad run for a reprint mag, and one that many a failed new series would've envied. Anyway, I've shown all these covers in several blog posts some years ago, but now it's time for the 'omnibus edition' so that you can see them all together in one place. All you have to do is look and enjoy - though a comment would be appreciated should you feel so compelled. Did you buy this comic back in the day? Do you still have them? Or were you injudicious enough not to have bothered buying them when you could? (There you go - that's given you plenty to work with - get typing!)
And remember - click on images to enlarge, the click again for optimum size.
8 comments:
I fondly remember this run of Marvel Tales. It was a brilliant notion to run all the Ditko stories in sequence. Marvel Tales was one of Marvel's best series, reprint or otherwise with many slightly different faces over the years. I remember they changed some of the cultural references in the stories as well to adapt to a new audience. Marvel started reprinting their stories a mere four years or so, after the beginning of the Marvel success story in the 60's (sooner if you count the annuals) and it was a master stroke to bring fans up to date on the ongoing saga. The notion then was that a new generation of readers came along ever few years and needed to know the basics. I know I loved them all at the time, an era when collected reprints were a pipedream.
Fantasy Masterpieces was my first reprint and first Marvel comic. Bought from a newsagents in Malta. I was amazed how Marvel reprinted there stuff so quickly while DC did their 80 page giants of 1950s stuff which showed they hardly changed in a decade.
Mind you it was the Fantastic and Terrific comics that really got me hooked on the narrative and then a few years later of course MWOM etc.
I didn't realise they started reprinting the Ditko and Romita issues again in the 1980s, I've been picking up a few of the Romita issues of Marvel Tales from the 1970s, I would have picked up more but costly for reprints. Nice cover selection.
The great thing about Marvel Tales, RJ, was that it allowed those who had missed the original mags in the '60s to catch up in an individual format pretty close to how these tales had first been presented. And on ordinary newsprint paper too! As it says on the cover of #143 - The Marvel Age Of Comics Is Back! Or at least it WAS in the '80s.
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Funnily enough, NB, I have the first issue of Fantasy Masterpieces - plus quite a few of the early issues as well. It was also Fantastic and Terrific (as well as Wham!, Smash!, & Pow!) that introduced me to Marvel, just like yourself. And MWOM was a brilliant comic for around the first 30-plus issues, before cost-cutting changes were introduced (loss of colour and spot colour, etc), and robbed it of some of its charm.
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Most of these Ditko Spidey issues had already been reprinted in Marvel Tales a few years before, McS, but they shared the mag with other heroes. It was a brilliant idea to reprint them again, but this time with the original covers - and in sequence, with the Annuals appearing between the stories just as they would've done originally. To me, Having this run of MT is almost just like having the original printings of ASM.
I don't recall seeing any of these but here's something I do remember about the "M" design in the corner-box which contained the number/month and the American price with the UK and Canadian prices underneath. I was in WH Smith's one day and a young boy, aged about 7, was wailing because his mother wouldn't buy him the comic he wanted. The comic was a Marvel comic with that "M" design in the corner-box and I heard the mother say "I'm not paying 60 bloody pence for a comic!" but of course the comic was 60 CENTS with the UK price of 20p underneath in smaller print. I felt sorry for the little kid but I didn't dare intervene and explain the mother's mistake as I was afraid she might bite my head off!
I've overheard mothers saying something similar to their kids quite a few times, CJ, and that's in relation to UK prices. I remember one kid wanting a Classics From The Comics issue, which cost £1 - "I'm not paying a £1 for a comic" she said, even though it was extra thick and, at around 1 pence per page, worked out at pretty good value. She probably considered it expensive 'cos comics would've only been around 20p in her day so a £1 seemed like a huge jump. She probably took the huge rise in the cost of her cigarettes in her stride because it crept up gradually a few pence at a time and therefore didn't seem so extreme or sudden.
I recently purchased MT 54 and 55 "The Tablet of youth" storyline from the early 1970s they wanted £12 for them in one shop so I gave it a pass but found them in Glasgow Forbidden Planet later that same day, in nice condition but had "5p" writen on the covers in blue pen ( not a problem for me) for £2 each. They had the 1980s MT issue 138(FF) for £10!!!?
I've got a softcover collection of those Spidey strips, which also includes a new 3-part tale drawn by Steve Rude, McS - very nice indeed. (I think I showed it on the blog and you commented on it, if memory serves.) The prices of some reprints of first (or near first) appearances of certain characters verges on the ridiculous, eh?
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