Marvel Screwed Up the Final Marvel Value Stamp

Welcome to the 888th installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. This time, our first legend is about whether Marvel's Marvel Value Stamp program handled its final stamp the way it said it did.

In the early 1970s, a momentous change occurred at Marvel Comics, which had been sold off to a conglomerate in the late 1960s. After selling the company, Martin Goodman remained as the publisher until retiring in 1971. Stan Lee then took over as Publisher, with Roy Thomas moving up to become the Editor-in-Chief. As the Publisher, Lee devoted his time less to the day-to-day management of the comic books themselves and instead to new ideas to help make Marvel more money. One of those ideas was the Marvel Value Stamp, a reward system designed to get fans to collect as many Marvel comics as possible to collect all of the possible stamps.

Abrams has a new book out called Marvel Value Stamps: A Visual History, which includes Roy Thomas discussing the history of the Marvel Value Stamp (as far as he was privy to, of course), and in the discussion, he revealed an interesting secret about how the final stamp in the set didn't work out the way that Marvel intended it to, as instead of only being available in a single Marvel comic, it ended up in three! It wasn't even the rarest stamp in the collection!

What were Marvel Value Stamps?

While it is no longer a familiar part of our everyday lives, and hasn't been in decades, for many years, a very common part of people's lives was the idea of receiving stamps from your local supermarket. Every purchase would give you X amount of stamps, and after you collected a certain amount of stamps, you could trade them in for a certain item. Of course, just like in arcades, it was something like 10 trillion stamps gets you a toaster or whatever, but still, it was an extremely popular sales incentive that continued for decades before fizzling out in the 1980s. If you look at old sitcoms, you'll see them mentioning supermarket stamps frequently. There's a famous episode of The Brady Bunch where the boys and the girls had each collected a certain amount of stamps before their parents were married, and now that they were married, they could pool their stamps together to get something cool, but they couldn't agree on what to get, leading to a "boys versus girls" conflict. In the end, the girls got something for the whole family. In any event, long story short, the idea of collecting stamps as a sign of customer loyalty that would be rewarded once you collected enough was a very common thing in American culture in the 1970s.

So Stan Lee used that approach when he came up with the idea of Marvel comic books in England. Marvel UK launched with trade-in "coupons" in the first few issues of Marvel UK's first comic book over there, and the reward was a poster featuring six Marvel superheroes. Later, they did the same idea when Spider-Man received his first British series, and the reward was a Spider-Man poster.

The idea worked so well that Lee brought it over to the United States to use on Marvel proper in 1974. Marvel's comics throughout the year would include numbered "Value Stamps." They then sold a stamp book for 50 cents (plus a copy of the British Spider-Man poster) that you would the affix the 100 stamps that you cut out and pasted into the book and you would get a reward...

The amusing thing, of course, is that Lee didn't know what the reward would be when he started the program, but eventually, it boiled down to 10% discounts on Marvel merchandise and also discounts at New York and San Diego comic book conventions. The idea was repeated in a second series of stamps (these would be puzzles that would form images when combined), but then just faded into history (Lee sort of lost interest in the idea).

How did the final Marvel Value Stamp go wrong?

Soon after the program launched, Marvel also began hyping up the mystery 100th stamp in the collection, the one you needed to complete the whole set. While all of the other stamps were in multiple comics, the 100th stamp would only be in a single comic book (the stamps were not released in numerical order, so #100 appeared before a lot of other stamps)!

Marvel promoting the mystery 100th Marvel Value Stamp

That was the PLAN, but in reality, it did not work out that way. Speaking to sort of the haphazard nature of the stamp idea (like not knowing what the reward would be when the program was launched), the 100th stamp was PLANNED to only be released in Sub-Mariner #72, the final issue of that series. In reality, though, the stamp ended up appearing in TWO OTHER comic books! Even Roy Thomas, when writing in the Marvel Value Stamps book, only recalled that it ended up in Fantastic Four #154, as well, by mistake, but it ALSO ended up in Amazing Spider-Man #1451

The 100th stamp, by the way, was of Galactus, the world devourer...

Galactus was the final Marvel Value Stamp

Ironically, then, Galactus ended up not even being the rarest stamp! A number of other stamps, like Loki, Sif and the Warriors Three appeared only twice (Volstagg on his own appeared four times, though). Amusingly enough, though, there WAS a character who only appeared once, the minor Namor character, Byrrah, who only appeared in Marvel Team-Up #22.

Isn't that hilarious, though? They planned for #100 to be the rarest, and #92 was instead!

In any event, be sure to check out Marvel Value Stamps: A Visual History, it has all of the original artwork that was used for the stamps, it shows all of the stamps in the letter columns that they appeared in, and it has a nice writeup on the stamps history by the great Roy Thomas.