It must be really complicated to collected Alan Class comics. What I mean is that for many years when I was actively building my back issue collection (fool that I was) I often depended on my memory of covers to know if I had a book or not. It didn't always work as I have more than a few duplicates of things tucked away. But if I'd been looking for back issues of Astounding Stories like the one above featuring art by the great Frank McLaughlin, I'd have been most confused since that exact cover image (which originally appeared on Judomaster #89) is used three more times during the run. See below.
And then they pull the same stunt again on Amazing Stories of Suspense. Four great McLaughlin covers (this time from Judomaster #90), all pretty much identical.
Now they didn't just do this with Judomaster covers, but pretty much with all of them. So as I said, getting Alan Class comics must be quite confusing.
On a different note, seeing the same image repeated like this in the post gives the whole schmeer a somewhat bizarre Warholian quality.
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One of the disappointing things about the Class comics was that the same printing plates (so I'm told) were used over the years so that later reprints were very often of poor quality, with blacks not quite as solid as they were in earlier editions. The page count was also reduced from 68 pages to, I think, 52, so when you're replacing one, unless you get a copy of the exact comic you had at the time, you may be confused to find that a story you thought was in the issue, isn't. That aside, they were good value for money.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. So you're confirming for me what I assumed that these were pretty much identical comics released over and over again with modifications for that specific spending cycle. I'm reminded very much of what Charlton did with Modern Comics, another imprint which reprinted old Charlton stuff with new ads but little if anything else changed but some removed pages perhaps.
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