Old Comics Wednesday

Recently,when I talked about trade paperbacks, I mentioned the mass market collections that I loved back then.  Here they are!

I didn't have all of these when I was a kid- heck, at the time I wasn't even a fan of Conan- but the ones I did actually came in a slipcase- two of the Spidermans, The Fantastic Four, and The Hulk. 

They're from Pocket Books, the same publisher that did the trade paperbacks, and they shrank the comic book page from standard comic size to the dimensions of a paperback.  I now just look at the pictures since my oldman eyes can't read the 12pt typeface.  The exception is the Conan book, published by Ace presumably since they had the rights to the Robert Howard Conan stories.  They- wisely in my opinion- just removed the panels from the context of the comic page and put them, closer to their original size, on the paperback page (the exception to this, of course, is the splash page, the first, full sized page that starts most stories.) 

Because of the format Conan used, they only got three issues per book, while the Pocket Books usually got six- a little more for Doctor Strange since his stories didn't take up a whole issue, he was sharing Strange Adventure with The Human Torch for most of that.

Next time I'm at my parents house, I'm going to have to dig my original copies out of storage, the last book I need to finish the collection, Spider Woman, is boxed up in the attic.