No Avengers in 10/1971 - price rise in 11/1971

[Yellowjacket]

Hello everybody!

I´m writing an article for my homepage. On researching I did notice, that in 10/1971 appeared no Avengers (as well as Thor and DD of the main characters).

Does anybody here know, why 10/1971 was jumped? Was it simply due to time/publishing issues?

I see that there was a price increase with Marvel in 11/1971 - is there any connection? For me, it seems to be a quite tricky price increase:

Avengers #92 [09/1971] - 15c
Avengers #93 [11/1971] - 25c
Avengers #94ff. [12/1971] - 20c

The stories in 11/1971 (I think all of them) did cost 25c, but had therefore an expanded extend (33 to 35 pages). Then in 12/1971 the price dropped to 20c - although this is of course more than the 15c in 09/1971.

Did the "not missing" comic books (FF, SM etc.) in 10/1971 cost 15c, too?

And has the increase in price anything to do with the jumped month of Avengers (as well as Thor & DD)?
Maybe someone here can help me.

Yellowjacket
aka Gernot Zipperling
Webmaster of Williams-Marvel-Comic-Archiv
www.wmca.de

[sharkar]

Hi, Yellowjacket. I'm not sure but I think the missed month (October 1971) for some books was to get all the Marvel mags on the same page, so to speak. A few books, like the Avengers, were cover dated a month behind the other books. Example: the first Avengers I ever bought was #45, cover date October 1967. But the FF that was sale at the exact same time was #68, yet it was cover dated November 1967! I bought these 2 issues at the same time (in August 1967), at the same store, and this continued for years, the Avengers issue always being a month "behind" the FF (the 2 comics I bought regularly). Then in July 1971, there was no October Avengers, but there was an October FF , issue 115, still 15 cents (so yes, the October 1971 Marvels were still 15 cents). The next month, all the monthly books were cover dated November 1971 and were 25 cents (FF 116, Avengers 93). It was all very confusing (I was a kid back then ) and I remember I was very upset because I thought I had missed an Avengers issue!

[asgardian]

The fact that #93 was also a double-sized issue (Neal Adams art) may also have something to do with it.

[sharkar]

Hi again, Yellowjacket, I think I implied that there was no Avengers issue in July 1971 at the time FF 115 was published. Wrong. There was no actual gap in months for the Avengers issues. Each issue was still published monthly. In July 1971, FF 115 (Oct) and Avengers 92 (Sept) were published (15 cents issues). Then in August 1971, FF 116 (Nov) and Avengers 93 (now also labeled Nov, and not, as expected, Oct) were published--and each contained more pages and cost 25 cents. So the issue that should have been called "October" was still published on schedule, it was just that it was instead labeled "November."

[Yellowjacket]

Thank you, sharkar, your answer is very helpful!