Fantastic and Terrific

By way of a belated birthday present, my brother found me a fantastic old comic, in more ways than one. It's issue 78 of Fantastic, the magazine of choice in the late sixties for British children who wanted to read American superhero comics but couldn't get hold of the originals. Or at least I assume it was - I've never heard of it before.

Actually, the title at this point in the comic's history was "Fantastic and Terrific", with the "and Terrific" in very small letters. This used to be a common sight on British comics - an unsuccessful one would be swallowed up by a more popular title, and the names would both be featured prominently on the covers for a while, so as to make sure not to lose the few readers who only liked the failing comic, before the second name, like Terrific, was quietly dropped. The cover also features the logo "A Power Comic", with a picture of a fist just to emphasise how powerful it is, the date (10 August 1968) and a little copyright notice for Odhams Press Ltd.

It was on sale every Monday for 9d - Australia 10c, South Africa 10c, East Africa 1.25, New Zealand 1/- (10c), Rhodesia 1/3, West Africa 1/-. So it's educational too - NZ was obviously in the process of decimalisation at the time, and a shilling went further in West Africa than it did in Rhodesia. The rather uninspired cover illustration is a close-up of the superhero Goliath's head, and a photo of the Fantastic Book of Soccer Stars that could be found inside.

The front and back covers are the only splash of colour in the comic - the British standard at the time was anthology magazines, in black and white, with five or six stories of five or six pages maximum each, with the obligatory crossword puzzles, letters pages, competitions and fun facts to pad out the stuff that people actually wanted to read. So ignoring the fact that the American material being repeated was designed to be read in full colour, in 20-page bursts every month, Fantastic strictly follows the British format. We get a luxurious nine pages of Avengers, Goliath and his friends battling the evil alien Ixar, five pages of Dr Strange in the middle of a longer magical fight scene with Yandroth, five pages of the X-Men thwarting the plans of the Mutant-Master and Factor Three, six pages of Thor exploring Ego the Living Planet, including a glorious double-page spread that must have looked so much better in colour, and eight pages of the Hulk fighting the Sub-Mariner. Plus a full-colour back-page pin-up of Unus the Untouchable, a crossword that you need to know the name of the Beast's girlfriend to solve, a "Spot the Boob" competition which isn't nearly as fun as it sounds (it's a spot-the-deliberate-mistake thing), letters and editorials. All for ninepence!

There's three-quarters of a page of adverts in the entire comic - two little ads for stamp collectors' outfits, and an encouragement to buy Tonibell Miniballs - the ball with the ice cream inside - in order to enter a competition and win £50 of vouchers to spend in London's biggest toy shop. Oh, and rather incongrously in amongst all the superheroes, there's the first of five pull-out profiles of famous footballers, that you can put together to make a little book, just in time for the 1968/69 season. This week it's Bobby Moore (who gets the front page, of course), Billy Bremner, Billy McNeill and Jeff Astle. Bremner's Leeds went on to win the league that year, if anyone's interested, so the Fantastic editors Bart and Alf (whose names replaced Stan Lee's in rewritten footnotes to the superhero comics) obviously knew how to pick the winners.

They really don't make them like that any more.