So Much Fun Reprints

At the right is a copy of Fantastic Four #306. It's a fairly unremarkable issue in the grand scheme of the title. It's the FF versus Diablo and some elemental creatures he's cooked up; you can get the gist of the story from the cover pretty easily. Written by Steve Englehart with art by John Buscema and Joe Sinnott. It's not a bad story at all, but it doesn't hold any particular significance. All the creators had been working on the title for at least a few issues already, and there are no new characters introduced here. No big story revelations or anything. A decent story, but it doesn't especially stand out.

Except!

If you've looked at the cover a little more closely, you might notice that it's actually NOT from the regular Fantastic Four title. It's titled "Fantastic Four Classic and there's a note where the UPC symbol would go that says "Distributed by: So Much Fun! Inc." You might be prone to thinking, "Fantastic Four Classic?!? I've never heard of that title before! I know Marvel's done some FF reprint books but that doesn't sound familiar at all! What gives?"

Well, that's what I thought when I saw it at any rate!

To set your mind at ease, there is no Fantastic Four Classic title that you somehow missed. The "Classic" only appears on the cover, and the official indicia inside just says it's a second printing of Fantastic Four #306. So what's with the "Classic" and who is "So Much Fun! Inc."?

There's actually a bit of a mystery around this. There are, in fact, twelve different comics that seem to have a So Much Fun! distribution notice on them, and they all also have the word "classic" attached to the title on the cover. But the list of issues might surprise you. They are...

• Amazing Spider-Man #292
• Archie #282
• Batman #401
• Betty and Veronica #289
• Fantastic Four #306
• G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero #63
• Incredible Hulk #335
• Justice League of America #217
• The Man of Steel #1
• Star Trek #6
• Superman # 161
• Uncanny X-Men #221

Now you may notice that there are three different publishers at play here: Marvel, DC, and Archie. The Marvel issues all reprint stories from late 1987, the two Archie issues come from 1979 and 1980, and the DC issues range from 1963 to 1986. What gives?

Nobody seems to know a whole lot unfortunately. I'll relay what I've been to find and put out a few ideas afterwards.

So Much Fun! Inc. operated out of Massachusettes for a brief period in the late 1980s. They apparently had connections with non-comic shops that sold paper products (think: stationery and greeting cards -- like Hallmark stores but small, independently owned shops) and thought that maybe comics might sell in those venues as well. Perhaps to kids who were dragged into the store by their parents. Rather that trying to set themselves up as a regular distributor of new comics like one might for a newsstand, they instead opted for selling a bagged collection of three different comics. This is very much like those bagged sets of three issues that you might've found in drug stores in the 1970s and 1980s.

I've seen people claim the initial print run for these was 5,000 for each issue. I've seen no citations for where that number comes from though. I've also seen no details on which comics may/may not have been packed together; given that there are only two Archie books, you must've gotten at least two publishers in some bags, but I don't know if there was any rhyme or reason to how they were bagged together or if it was just random.

In doing some digging, I found So Much Fun! also produced sticker packs that were clearly aimed at kids. Rainbows and unicorns with a prism reflective effect, that kind of thing. Given that they seemed to put some degree of effort into the promotion and packaging of these stickers, my guess is that was closer to their main business venture.

If you love these stickers --
And they are the best,
We offer many others,
Collect all the rest!

(It's not good, but it required effort!)

My guess is that stickers were their primary business. Sticker collecting was definitely a big thing in the late '70s and early '80s. As the '80s wore on, though, and stickers weren't as popular, they looked for other ways to make some money that would be adjacent to sticker production. Someone almost certainly recalled those 3-comic bags from earlier and felt there was a decent overlap. They would've been in stationery stores already with a product that was aimed at a kid market. They managed to contact the "big 3" comic publishers and arranged to have small runs of existing comics printed up, presumably to be bagged (and distributed) by themselves.

For the publishers, it would've been a fairly easy request. Just run a few thousand copies of something they had already set up, and send them to a different address. What's interesting is how they interpretted the reuqest. If you look at the Marvel books, they're all virtually identical except for dropping the "Classic" and "So Much Fun" text on there. They just grabbed five of the most recent issues and they barely seemed to care beyond that; the "Classic" on the Hulk cover is just the black text over top of a heavily shadowed part of the art, so much so that you can barely even see it, much less read it! Archie put in a modicum more work by removing the "Archie Comics Group" banner and neatly replacing it with "Achie Classic Comics." Presumably they went back a few years for their issues so it wouldn't compete with what was on the stands at the time? Whether Marvel didn't think there was enough audience overlap or recognized that the small print run wouldn't impact their regular sales at all, they didn't seem to have that concern at all; they went with what was going to print at that time anyway, presumably so they didn't have to do any additional logistical work.

DC put in the most effort, reworking their cover art to update logos and remove cross-promotional banners and such. The Man of Steel issue loses it's mini-series and "comics event of the century" tag lines, the Justice League issue has the logo replaced with the then-current version, and the Superman issue updates the DC logo and re-sizes the Superman title for examples. They seem to have taken the approach that every place they appear, it should reflect on them as pristinely as possible. Presumably, given the range of issues selected for reprinting here, they put some effort into those selections as well. Digging out that 25-year-old production art for Superman was no small task, I'm almost certain.

Given the range of effort in the companies' response, I suspect no one at So Much Fun! had much knowledge about the comic book market of the late 1980s. They seem to have left many of the decisions up to the publishers and were okay with whatever the result was as long as they got some comics they could turn around and sell to stationery shops. Of course, that's almost certainly why the project failed. Well, I'm assuming it failed since there appears to have only been the one "run" of issues, and they're not that hard to come by despite the low print quantities. By 1987, comics were well into the days of the direct market and the semi-"blind bag" drug store approach was effectively dead. To my recollection, it was even starting to get difficult to find comics just on a newsstand or spinner rack by that point.

(As I think on it, I seem to recall Marvel trying the 3-comic-bag approach with their original Secret Wars comic in 1984. They had the main title available in 3-issue runs, and another two or three sets of all the other issues that directly led up it -- the ones where the different heroes find that weird structure in Central Park, wander into it, and then vanish. If those sold poorly, that might explain why Marvel put so little effort into the So Much Fun! issues -- they knew first-hand that they wouldn't sell very well.)

Anyway, as I said, those last few paragraphs are mostly speculation on my part. The books are an interesting curiosity, but probably not relevant unless you have some kind of completist mindset for them. (No judgement on my part, by the way! Whatever floats your boat is cool! They're just not for me.) But now you know what you're looking at if you happen across one of thesse "Classic" titles as you're scanning through a back issue bin and find yourself wondering what the heck you're looking at!

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