These 3 packs are very common on E-Bay with one or more listed at any given time. They go for $10 - $15 usually, although I've snagged a few in the past few years for under $10.
I'm guessing your 3 packs have the word REPRINT printed on the cover vertically below the diamond. What I've been trying to figure out is where do the $0.35 copies without the word REPRINT with the diamond and a blank UPC come from? I've bought several of these bags over the years and have never seen one without the word REPRINT for issues 1-3.
On this page http://www.bipcomics.com/showcase/StarWars/Marvel/StarWars/001-006.html I'm referring to the first 3 issues on the last row.
Also, I noticed on that page the $0.35 5 and 6 with diamond and blank UPC are not reprints, but I have 3 packs with those 2 copies and the $0.35 4 with diamond and blank UPC that is a reprint. So, they bundled a reprint with 2 non-reprints?
They are DIRECT MARKET copies, with the blank UPCs being made for the 3-packs by special order from Whitman.
If there is no "reprint" on the cover or at the indicia, it's not a reprint.
And yes, in the confusion of the reprints, it was very possible that Whitman would have bundled reprints and non-reprints together. Whitman got pallets of books for months, so that they would have 2-3 issues of any given run to put in their packs. That's one of the reasons why everyone thought they were all reprints: they showed up months after the originals.
But this was never the case. They simply sat on them until they could make whatever 3-packs they wanted to make, and then distributed them to K-Mart, Wal-Mart, etc.
There wasn't a "direct market" back then, just a handful of comic shops that got their new releases the same day the newsstand got theirs.
You are mistaken. The Direct Market has existed since 1974, at the latest. By 1977, the Direct Market had been around for multiple years, and Marvel had already devised a program by which they could separate the DM copies from the newsstand copies.