The Launch of Fantastic
Following the successes of Wham! (1964) and Smash! (1966) Odhams were keen to expand their line of weekly Power Comics in 1967. In January they launched Pow! with 'Spider-Man' as the lead strip, and a month later saw the arrival of a comic that consisted almost entirely of Marvel reprints: Fantastic.
Fantastic No.1, which launched on Saturday February 11, 1967, had a different format to its three predecessors. Slightly smaller in size and on better paper, it featured a whopping 40 pages and a higher cover price (9d, compared to Smash's 7d for 28 pages). This made it three times more expensive than the 3d cover price of D C Thomson's perennials Beano and Dandy. It could not sustain a profit in the increasingly crowded market of 1960s comics, but it did gain a faithful following, and served as an introduction to many of Marvel's superhero characters.
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