Mar-Vell’s Greatest Combats.
Sixty-eight big pages for fifty cents: the Giant-Size format was Marvel’s mid-’70s answer to a simple question — how do you give new readers the good stuff without making them hunt back issues? Giant-Size Captain Marvel #1, from 1975, is the annual-style collection that gathered Mar-Vell’s best fights into a single fat package, reprinting Captain Marvel #17, #20 and #21.
The Rich Buckler and Marie Severin cover does the selling — the cosmic Captain flanked by the Hulk and Captain America, the whole thing crackling with Bronze Age energy. It’s not a key, and it doesn’t pretend to be; it’s a handsome, high-spirited reader’s book from the era when Marvel was learning how to package its own history.
What sets this copy apart is condition. Graded CBCS 9.6 with White pages, it sits at the top of what surfaces for this issue — bright, glossy, sharp-cornered, the way few forty-year-old newsstand giants survive. A clean, collectible example in a CBCS holder for someone who wants the format done right.
CBCS 9.6 · White Pages · Marvel Comics, 1975.
Mar-Vell’s Greatest Combats.
Sixty-eight big pages for fifty cents: the Giant-Size format was Marvel’s mid-’70s answer to a simple question — how do you give new readers the good stuff without making them hunt back issues? Giant-Size Captain Marvel #1, from 1975, is the annual-style collection that gathered Mar-Vell’s best fights into a single fat package, reprinting Captain Marvel #17, #20 and #21.
The Rich Buckler and Marie Severin cover does the selling — the cosmic Captain flanked by the Hulk and Captain America, the whole thing crackling with Bronze Age energy. It’s not a key, and it doesn’t pretend to be; it’s a handsome, high-spirited reader’s book from the era when Marvel was learning how to package its own history.
What sets this copy apart is condition. Graded CBCS 9.6 with White pages, it sits at the top of what surfaces for this issue — bright, glossy, sharp-cornered, the way few forty-year-old newsstand giants survive. A clean, collectible example in a CBCS holder for someone who wants the format done right.
CBCS 9.6 · White Pages · Marvel Comics, 1975.
