Sensationell!

Here is another comic from 25 years ago from Panini Deutchland that ought to be but isn’t extra dickes. The original annual had the main story plus ten (count ’em) shorter sf/fantasy reprints. This comic only has just the main story within its 28 pages including the covers, but it does squeeze in a middle page pinup and an interesting 6 page text article.

To paraphrase the first paragraph which says:-

“You have just read a very special story. The Strange Tales Annual 2 that it comes from appeared in July 1963 at the same time as Amazing Spider-Man No 3 so it is the 4th or 5th ever appearance of Spider-Man. Even among die-hard Marvel fans there are only a few who are aware of this extremely rare, hardly ever reprinted issue. But you know all about it now, you lucky ones.”

Which I suppose would be true for die-hard Marvel fans living in Germany. We often forget what an international phenomenon Marvel characters already were even before those 33 and counting movies that have been released worldwide over the last twenty years or so.

Extra Dickes??

It amuses me the blatant lies told on comic book covers. Here we have a Panini Deutschland comic from the 1990s. At first glance it appears to be a German reprint of Amazing Spider-Man Annual No 2 but it only consists of 28 pages including card covers. The whole comic contains the Dr Strange teamup story. All the other stories in the original US comic are missing. What made them claim it was Extra Dickes (has extra thickness) at the top of the cover? They even claim it has Mehr Seiten (more pages) when it actually has the same number of pages as the regular 4.95DM comics they were publishing. In fact it is only one third of the size of the original Annual. What a swiz.

The back cover