Gone but not forgotten – Marvel Value Stamps

In March 1974 Marvel began printing value stamps on the letters pages of all their titles. Series A of the value stamps consisted of 100 pieces of art taken from old comics and old unused pieces of artwork which were cropped to appear in the form of a postage stamp. Marvel also sold a stamp book (image above ) for 50 cents where collectors could put their stamps. At the time I had no idea what these stamps were for, but seemingly a full book of stamps entitled the owner to discounts on admission to various comic book conventions and merchandise while leaving their comic book collection “mutilated”. Collectors beware when picking up any back issues from the 1974/76 period as you may find (like myself) that the letters page and sometimes a corresponding story page has been snipped to remove the value stamp.

As noted above a total of 100 stamps were produced in series A. Stamp 1 shown above from the letters page of Captain Marvel issue 35, featured Spider-Man. Just before they printed the 100th stamp they printed a mystery stamp to tease readers as to who would actually appear in the last stamp – it was Galactus (below) although personally I would have though Stan Lee would have been a better choice.

Following the success of series A Marvel introduced a new series B in December 1975 which consisted of a set of 100 “puzzle pieces” of artwork again taken from older comics/art. When these were collected and put together they created 10 separate images of Marvel characters; Thor (below) Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Dracula, Silver Surfer, Conan , Dr Strange, Captain America, and Stan (the Man) Lee.

Marvel Stamp "Puzzle piece" from Series B - part of the Thor image below.

As with Series A Marvel also provided a book (above) where these could be collected and traded etc.

Below are some other Marvel Valuse Stamps for Series A:

image from Marvel Wiki

Image form Marvel Wiki