The different sets were: Amazing Spider-Man and Captain America from Marvel Comics, Man of Steel and Untold Legend of Batman mini-series from DC and various Archie comics. Except for the Man of Steel 6 issue mini-series all the others had 3 issues each. See the gallery below for cover scans of all issues.
These were apparently sold in retail outlets and toy stores back in 1990 or thereabouts. Besides the smaller size-the Marvel issues have the Shan-Lon and MPI logos somewhere along the bottom of the cover and the DC issues have just the MPI logo. The Archies do not have any extra logos on the cover but are missing the prices in the upper left hand corner. Apart from that these comics have no ads except those on the covers and they all have “printed in Canada” in the indicia. The back covers of all these issues are also very different from the originals.
As I mentioned above besides the individual issues-various sets were also issued. So far we know there is an Untold Legend of Batman 3 issue set and a set of just the cassettes for that series as well. There are also at least 2 mixed series sets-one has all the 1st issues from each of the 5 different sets and the other has the 3rd issues of 4 of the sets (the Captain America issue is not included). There are probably at least one more of these mixed bundles with the 2nd issues of the various series but as of yet it has not surfaced. I have a complete set of the comics but only a few of them were bought in the original packaging. The Archies seem to be the toughest issues to find although the Spider-Man issues command the highest prices. |
