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Tales of Suspense thread
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361 posts in this topic

On 1/23/2021 at 1:25 PM, Gaard said:

Some of these titles have little ~2 page stories (usually,as far as I can tell, text stories). Are any of them any good?

These little 2 page stories were included to get the cheapest shipping rates:

"In the early days of comic books, they naturally wanted to qualify for magazine postal rates, which were the cheapest of the postal rates of the era. However, to qualify as a magazine, a periodical would have to include at least two pages of pure text."

https://www.cbr.com/marvel-comics-how-many-pages-long/#:~:text=In the early days of,two pages of pure text.

That was Stan Lee's first real Timely job - write a 2 page text story for Captain America #3 :)

Having just done some detailed analysis on Job Codes as it relates to the Atlas to Marvel transition, the 2 page text stories are heavily reprinted from earlier sources. The "A" job codes started in 1952, before that they were purely numeric. There are "A" series stories that have been reprinted 6 or 8 times up until the superhero content encompassed the entire books. Early Pre-Hero Marvels routinely reprinted these text stories from pre-code titles. I literally saw every job code prefix (A-H, J-M) referenced in the Atlas to Marvel transition (1957-1964). The same text story appeared several times during the Strange Tales series.

These 2 page text stories appeared in TOS 1-44 (9/63). TOS 45 didn't have any for some reason. TOS 46 - 49 went back to the 2 page text stories. TOS 50 had none either. TOS 51-58 had 1 page text stories. And then they were replaced with letter pages, pin-ups and upcoming announcements as Marvel secured expanded distribution rights.

Some are okay, most are fairly formulaic as one would expect since the main reason for them was to save on shipping costs.

-bc

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