Mark Evanier shares a great story over on his blog about a time when comic companies had to justify raising their prices:

Fantastic Four #128 was an unusual comic book. It had the usual 32 pages plus cover but it also had a four-page “pin-up” section on glossy paper stapled into the center — the only comic Marvel ever published like that. Why would they do such a thing? Here’s why…

This issue was published not long after Marvel had upped the price of their comics from 15 cents to 20. There was a wage-price freeze on in this country — this was 1972 — and you couldn’t raise the price of a product unless you could show that you were giving more for the money. A fan wrote to the appropriate commission and complained that Marvel had upped the cost of comic books like Fantastic Four. This led to some government functionary writing to Marvel…and I guess the guy didn’t understand that they’d increased the cost of all their comics, not just F.F. But his letter demanded that Marvel demonstrate that Fantastic Four had made some change to justify the increase. In response, the company quickly added the four page section to the next issue. Once it was off the press, they sent a copy to the government functionary along with a fifteen-cent issue that lacked the extra pages…and he was apparently satisfied, even though it was just one issue of one of their comics.

End of problem…and another great example of Your Tax Dollars At Work.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 11:28 am and is filed under Comic Books, Marvel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.