Silver Age Promotionals and Oddities 1 1

[Qalyar]

There have been weird promotional and PSA comics for as long as there have been comics. Most of the time, no one really cares. But with SA books, at least they're old! I'll start. What do chocolate and stamp collecting have to do with Silver Age comic?

Nestle -- yes, the chocolate company -- got into a side business of selling cheap foreign postage stamps to kids aspiring to be stamp collectors. How? Why? I have no idea. They advertised in Boys Life, the magazine associated with the Boy Scouts of America. Here's a March 1959 ad, although this may not be the earliest of them.

You'll note down there at the bottom, they advertise a "true comic book" based on a "rare" Mozambique stamp. Well...

As the photo suggests -- that's a Modern bag and board -- this thing is tiny even for a mini-comic. But a mini-comic it is. About half of this booklet is a catalog for overpriced packets of random foreign stamps. But the rest is an actual comic book, telling the story of the "Crusader King" Afonso I of Portugal, whose victory was celebrated on the postage of then-Portuguese-colony Mozambique, 800 years later.

Of course, the Mozambique stamp they were hawking wasn't rare then and isn't now. It's never been worth a dollar even in high grades, and even before the stamp markets collapsed. And, as it turns out, the traditional story of Afonso's miraculous military victory appears to have been vastly exaggerated by his contemporaries to help him end up as king. But that's not really the point, know is it? And, after a fashion, we got a comic book out of it!