Learning the martial arts and becoming a Master of Men was within your grasp thanks to a correspondence course and a long playing 12″ 33 1/3 RPM instructional record which could be had for unbelievable price of 16¢ a lesson!
I wonder if students taking the course had the problem of the record skipping due to all of the jumping and flying kicks.
I like this illustration which is only a small portion of the full page ad. It looks like a real comic pro did it. The gal in the mini–dress looked like she was copied from John Romita work. She could be Gwen Stacy’s sister. The guy with the club and the skull jacket sort of looks like a John Byrne drawing. It’s a guess on my part.
This was from Giant-Size Fantastic Four No 4 which came out in 1975. Right off of the bat, do you notice something wrong with the cover?
Where’s the Invisible Girl? No, that’s not what I was getting at.
What’s with Johnny Storm’s red outfit? I always wondered about this myself. I had just started reading Fantastic Four and never knew, but that’s also not what I was alluding to.
Notice Ben Grimm’s hand?
Four fingers! Where the hell is my No-Prize?!
My other problem with the cover is that the newsstand’s owner had a penchant for marking up the comics with a grease pencil. He was old as the hills, and I guess his eyesight was failing him. He’d circle the prices so he could more easily spot them. I was horrified! Didn’t he realize that he was destroying the value of a potentially priceless artifact? Of course, I didn’t take a whole lot of care of it in the past 36 years.
I usually bought my comics from Davis Drug, but if they were out of a title, I was forced to go across the street to the grease pencil guy in the newsstand. It’s funny to think of it now. There were 2 places to buy comics in a small town in New Jersey in the 1970s. The mind boggles!
