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What Do Marvel Super Heroes Really Talk About in the Midst of Battle?
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When I talked about "Marvel Fun And Games" last week, I promised that one day I would tell the scintialating story of how I fouund out about it. This is that wonderful day, so get ready for an explanatory thrill-ride as I basically say "I saw it in an advert".
For LO! It saw it in an advert!
All right, there's a bit more to it than that, although not much. When I first looked through my corpus I was slightly mystified as to why Fantastic Four #220 was included. I have always loved John Byrne's run on the comic, and had read a reprint of this comic in "Volume 0" of Fantastic Four Visionaries: John Byrne, a collection of his various bits of Fantastic Four work before he took over properly, and didn't remember Doctor Doom appearing.
Normally when Doom isn't in the actual story it's because he's in an advert or editorial page, and I usually check this by visiting one of the "scan" sites, which sometimes contain these "paratexts" alongside the story pages. Sadly that wasn't the case for this one, but luckily for these me comics are fairly inexpensive, so I was able to buy a copy on eBay. Well, I say "luckily for me", but on the other hand I also have a complete collection of Byrne's FF run, which by this logic remains pretty much worthless!
When the comic arrived my suspicions were proved correct - Doom did appear in an advert, for "Fun And Games Magazine" as shown below, in an image clipped from the cover of Fantastic Four #200
What's interesting here (to me at least) is that this advert must have appeared in pretty much all other Marvel comics that month, yet it's only logged as appearing in two comics - this one and The Defenders #85. This demonstrates, yet again, the lack of consistency you get with crowd-sourced databases. They don't tend to have clear rules about what "counts" as a story or character appearance, so some people get a bit more enthusiastic than others. Looking at the databases it seems to me that the person who was logging "The Defenders" was one of these enthusiastic people, as several issues have advertisements logged in The Grand Comics Database where other series don't. That includes another one that we'll be looking at next week!
Tomorrow, however, Minor Appearances Month has a special flashback episode as we look at another comic that I discovered by accident, all the way from 1970!
link to information about this issue
posted 5/12/2019 by Mark Hibbett
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