So you scraped together the two bucks and waited patiently for the instructions to arrive in the mail while you pictured yourself buzzing the town on your boss GO-KART or sweet SPEED-BIKE! Wouldn’t it be great?! Imagine all of the kids choking on your exhaust while they were trying to keep up on their pathetic bicycles! You would be the coolest kid in town! The SECRET was inside a $2 pamphlet!
Now you have to figure out a way to explain to Dad why you have to destroy the lawn mower and your bike you got last Christmas IN ORDER to build a GO-KART or SPEED-BIKE. The pamphlet did not contain that secret.
The advertisement for go-kart and speed-bike instructions ran for years in comics, but I found this instance in a copy of Marvel’s Greatest Comics No. 48 which was published by Marvel Comics in 1973. It was a reprint of a Fantastic Four issue published in 1967. Back then, there was no way to get back issues of a comic unless you lived in a big city that may have had a second-hand magazine shop or one of the very few comic shops that existed at the time. If you missed an issue on the stands, that was it. You were out of luck. It was never to be seen again. Fortunately, Marvel had mercy on the poor fans and saw they could make money from old inventory so they released reprint titles such as Marvel Tales or Marvel Super-Heroes or Marvel’s Greatest Comics. It made sense for them. The art and story were already paid for, and as a fan, I loved the opportunity to read stories I thought would never be seen again.
Yep, or you traded with somebody that had missed a copy of something you had. I remember doing that!
Sometimes I would do a deep dive at a flea market where they would have stacks of comics with the covers torn off in the hopes of finding the missing part of a story.