MARVEL VALUE STAMPS A VISUAL HISTORY
Out two weeks ago, this little jewel was brought to my attention. Now I can’t tell you when I first noticed the now famous Marvel Stamps in my Marvel Comics but it must have been late 1974. It was quite early on but ironically enough, I didn’t initially know their purpose. (I was never one to read the what I referred to in those days as the corporate page.) As far as I was concerned it was just a cool bonus I was getting for my comic book money. It wasn’t until Marvel offered a stamp album that I started to catch on. But although the stamps were always printed on a page that would not force you to cut part of the story out, I never found the need to remove them for the comic.
Amazingly enough, when I first started working at a comic company in the way of grading and pricing books, that was one of the first lesson you got. Always check the interior of Marvel books to see if the stamp had been removed. And quite a few of them had which immediately lowered the price of the book. I always wondered if all those readers or Marvel, for that matter, realized that they were lowering the resale value of the books by cutting them out. I remember hearing others joke that this had been Marvel’s plan all along. Forcing comic readers to buy two copies so they could keep one intact. But I don’t believe that. These were the good old days of comics. Old comics were bought and sold from want lists and collector ads looking to trade. There was no internet, no eBay, no network of comic shops.
But what Stan “The Man” and the rest of the upper echelon at Marvel had done was tap into their list of gimmicks to snare new readers and reward loyalists. And that story is wonderfully detailed in the new (odd-shaped) hardback Marvel Value Stamps A Visual History by none other than Rascally Roy Thomas!
And while the backstory is a wonderful rabbit hole to dive down (including the overseas Marvel Stamps that started the whole ball of wax!), the best part of this book is the presentation of the whole run of the stamps. Going stamp by stamp, the researchers really dug deep presenting not only the stamps themselves but also where the artwork from the stamps came from and what issues of what titles they appeared in. They also show the later puzzle piece stamps and what they looked like assembled. This is an amazing (and loving) look at one of Marvel’s greatest gimmicks and reminds us of an easier time when reading and collecting comics was more fun and less stressful. How can I not give it a 10 out of 10 Grahams. As we used to say in the old days, MAKE MINE MARVEL!