That's a rather handsome take on Stan Lee...
Siskoid | Email | Homepage | 03.24.07 - 5:21 am | #

I suppose that I can't really mock this, since I WAS a proud member of FOOM. Still have the poster and everything.
Sally P | Email | Homepage | 03.24.07 - 7:08 am | #

Man I wish they'd do a trade paperback.
Dave Lartigue | Email | Homepage | 03.24.07 - 7:50 am | #

When I was 12, that seemed like the coolest thing ever.

Now I'm sort of morbidly curious and share Dave's wish.
Bruce Baugh | Email | 03.24.07 - 8:14 am | #

Yeah, I wanna see the dreams of '70s children as illustrated by Marvel's Bullpen!
Ron | Email | Homepage | 03.24.07 - 9:03 am | #

Wasn't it a knock-off Dynamite!
Anonymous | 03.24.07 - 9:41 am | #

"Where's my Pizzazz, Honey?"
Jon H | Email | 03.24.07 - 10:58 am | #

Yeah, seconded on wanting to see the dreams thing. That sounds absolutely wonderful.
K. Thor Jensen | Email | Homepage | 03.24.07 - 3:51 pm | #

It was kind of a DYNAMITE rip, in theory at least; but it had a much snarkier attitude, and work from a lot of semi-underground cartoonists. The humor and comics component ended up being more like a kid-friendly NATIONAL LAMPOON, if you can imagine such a thing.
Jack Feerick | Email | Homepage | 03.24.07 - 8:12 pm | #

Being there at the time, it was more a ripoff of Bananas, the sister Scholastic mag to Dynamite for slightly older kids. Dynamite and Bananas were SO popular when they came out, and I was really excited that Marvel was going to compete, because of course Marvel would do it so much better. What I forgot was that the appropriate analogy was Crazy compared to Mad -- Marvel was never very good at "getting" what made a competitor's magazine popular. I bought one issue, and didn't even finish reading it. It was also VERY hard to find on newsstands -- and I was looking for it.

on an interesting sidenote, I vaguely remember that Jeannette Kahn made her reputation publishing a children's magazine (very 70's empowerment type), then moved over to Scholastic and was VERY instrumental in bringing in Dynamite (and then Bananas). That was a lot of what got her to DC's attention when they wanted to hire someone with publishing credentials. But then again, I'm remembering this from reading things like The Comic Reader and TCJ back in the day, so I could have it wrong too.
Jim Kosmicki | Email | 03.24.07 - 8:52 pm | #

"Hulk want pretty pamphlet!"

"Back off, Green Machine! Power Man is bustin' through!"

We need more "bustin' through" covers these days.
Daniel85 | Email | Homepage | 03.25.07 - 4:06 am | #

Zingy post, Mike!

I'm Chalk!
Chalk | Email | 03.25.07 - 4:38 am | #

Love the red and blue printing: it made me think of bubble gum wrappers, for some reason.
Steve Flanagan | Email | Homepage | 03.25.07 - 5:43 am | #

wow I remember seeing those. Never really paid attention to what was being advertised, especially since it was years since it been printed, but I loved the lettering of the word PIZZAZZ. As a kid, I thought bubbled letters were the coolest. Too bad I never saw a copy of the mag. This is as big a regret as the fact that I never tasted the Fantastic Four's bubble gum from the early 80s.

Didn't Marvel print a mag called Marvel Age or something ? I used to own a lot of those when I was in jr high. Back then it was pretty much how I learned about old stories and such before I could afford back issues.
D.B. | Email | 03.25.07 - 7:52 am | #

So this wasn't subscription only?

(I've never seen it in random comics stores' "material from the 70s" sections. Of course, I don't think I've /looked/ that hard, but still.)
kate | Homepage | 03.25.07 - 8:17 am | #

So we have the Hulk, Spidey and... Ms Marvel? Stan's habit of trying to boost new/underperforming characters by guesting them in the big books is well known, but doing it an ad for a non-comics mag is one step beyond.
Mark S | Email | 03.26.07 - 12:22 am | #

Kate: No, PIZZAZZ could be found on newsstands--although, as mentioned above, distribution was spotty. That being said, I never saw the book until about eight issues into the run. It might have been a regional thing--I seem to recall that the book was first rolled out in the South and West, making the first few issues impossible to find in New England.

Or I could be totally misremembering.
Jack Feerick | Email | Homepage | 03.26.07 - 3:49 am | #

I had a subscription towards the end. Pizzazz had a Star Wars comic strip in it which is what kept me around.

Didn't know it was cancelled until a letter showed up from Marvel asking what comic I wanted to move my subscription to. That was the start of my subscribing to Marvel until almost the end of the series.

I liked that mag a lot. But I was the right age at the time.

Mike Nielsen
Mike Nielsen | Email | 03.26.07 - 6:24 am | #

I liked Pizzazz too, and was at the right age for it (11 or so.) I don't remember "The Dream Dimension" - did they actually do that? That could be a pretty weird feature!

I wouldn't be surprised if Ms. Marvel showed up in a lot of Marvel "promotional" material back in the day. Marketable (to "the outside") female characters have always been a weak spot of Marvel's superhero stable. Still true to a large extent.

But for material like this, they always try to insert at least one female and one minority character (Power Man here, of course, though the Falcon tended to pop up more than his inherent popularity would warrant, too.)
David C | Email | 03.26.07 - 10:06 am | #

Marvel Age was like the "newspaper" of Marvel Comics in the 1980s and 90s. Interviews with creators, previews, stuff like that.

Marvel Saga attempted to tell the history of the Marvel Universe in prose form, with some comic panels thrown in. It told the continuity of all Marvel comics from the 1960s onward cocurrently, attempting to make it all fit together. I don't know how long it ran, though.
Superhawk | 03.26.07 - 1:36 pm | #

" I don't remember "The Dream Dimension" - did they actually do that? That could be a pretty weird feature!"

Who knew so many of America's youth had undergone the MIND-TIME SYNC-WARP?
Jon H | Email | 03.26.07 - 9:04 pm | #