Pence Suspense

When Alan Class begaan publishing Tales of Suspense circa 1963 all his comics were 68 pages thick. A decade or so later he’d nearly used up his inventory and began reprinting his reprints. By then the prices had increased and he had also reduced the number of pages to 52.

Consequently when the contents of issue No 2 were re-issued in No 133 a couple of stories needed to be omitted. For reasons unknown he decided to omit a story that had its title featured at the bottom of the cover. No problem. He amended the cover to include the title of a story that was inside the comic.

Time moves on. Time to reprint issue No 133 once more. But Alan has either forgotten about changing the cover or possibly couldn’t find the changed plates or possibly didn’t think anyone would actually notice that issue Nos 161 and 199 featured a story title on the cover that wasn’t actually within the comic.

PS: For completeness the cover originally appeared on Astonishing No 58 cover dated February 1957. Marvel didn’t even think of reprinting old “Atlas” inventory for years. We in the UK had regular access to post-comic code 1950s weirdness like this for 30 years up to the 1980s.