Rare Comics

A couple days ago during my continuing adventures in cleaning, I came across these two comics. They have been missing for over a decade, and I had thought them long gone. In fact, I was convinced that they had never made it back to the US. But while I was looking through a box of some of my old Brazil souvenirs, I found them neatly wrapped in newspaper pages. Since I also saved many newspaper articles (and entire newspapers), some of which were also in that box, I had failed to notice the comics.

These were bought in Brazil in the very early nineties in one of those small used book shops that opens and then goes out of business within a few months. The comics were on display in the shop window. I used to be a comic book fanatic, and I was very much aware of what American comics were available in Brazil and their general look, but I had never come across anything nearly this old before. Not only were they old, but they are both first issues from 1970. And they were of the approximate dimensions of actual American comics, although of much lower quality. The interior pages are all in black and white.

I'm sure the store owners had some idea of their rarity, since they were on display and cost a substantial amount of money. I don't remember that amount, but the figure of the equivalent of US$7 apiece sticks in my mind. If so, that was a substantial price for a used comic in Brazil at that time.

Although one is the first issue of the Fantastic Four, it does not contain the first story, which explains their origin. Instead, it is a later story. But the cover explains that they now have their own comic due to popular demand, which implies that the earlier stories had appeared previously in anthology form, which, by the way, was also the later standard for printing Marvel comics in Brazil. (I have no idea how they do it currently.) In this issue, the Fantastic Four fight the Red Ghost. He is a villain, who, inspired by the origin of the Fantastic Four's superpowers (created by cosmic ray exposure when they went up in a rocketship), decided to get superpowers of his own. He went up in his own rocket with a bunch of monkeys, and it worked. He and his monkeys each received unique superpowers and were always up to no good. Of course, soon after that, American and Russian astronauts proved that cosmic rays do not actually give people (or monkeys) superpowers. A much later explanation was given that the members of the Fantastic Four had simply been unlucky and been in space during a rare period of unusually fierce cosmic ray activity. The Red Ghost realized this and calculated his space trip to coincide with another such period.

The second comic looks to be a Brazilian version of Tales of Suspense. Originally Iron Man and Captain America shared that single comic. They didn't work together or anything like like that. Each had a separate story in their half of the comic. Apparently in Brazil, the editors decided to stick Thor in there as well, despite the fact that Thor had had his own comic right from the beginning, when he appeared in, and ended up hijacking, Journey into Mystery. (Spiderman did something similar, appearing first in issue fifteen of Amazing Fantasy, but, instead of hijacking it, he went on to star in a separate comic called The Amazing Spiderman.) Tales to Astonish eventually went on to become exclusively the home of Captain America, and Iron Man separated off to start his own line of comics. (Or was it the other way around?)

I really don't know the actual value of these two comics. I suspect there is no actual set value. Although I'm certain they are extremely rare, as far as I know, comic books are not really collected in Latin America, at least not as objects representing monetary value. Someday that may change. In the meantime, I am delighted to have found them.