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Why are so many comics missing covers?

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sandmountainslim:
Just bought my first Captain Marvel Adventures and it is complete minus the cover. The seller I got it from said he bought it in a stack of coverless Golden Age comics. Doing an online search I find there is an abundance of old comics missing the covers. Why is this? Did people purposely remove the covers from their books? Why would they do this?

movielover:
I don't think most people removed the covers, it is probably the fact that the books are old and subject to falling apart

Rocket Riley:
Besides the normal wear and tear the comics have been subjected to over the course of seventy or more years, many comics were subjected to a process known as stripping.  In the 1940's and 50's when all comics were sold at news stands and drug stores, the retailer didn't have to return the whole comic to the distributor to get credit for unsold issues. All he had to return was either the front cover or the title strip(this is how you get 3/4 cover comic books) from the comic book.  In theory after "stripping" the front cover or the title strip from the comic the retailer was supposed to throw away the rest of the comic.  In practice, however many retailers sold the remainders to used magazine stores or used book stores to make a little extra money.  Many of these stores had vast piles of these coverless, and 3/4 covered comics. so when comic books became collectable in the early to mid 1960's they started selling them to collectors.  I remember one such place "Stan's Magazine Exchange" in Brocton Mass.  They offered coverless comics for .50, 3/4 covered comics for .75, and comics with full covers from $1.00 to $5.00.  This was 1965 of course.  My 12 year old fan-boy self couldn't resist and I once ordered a big pile of coverless comics from "Stan".  These days I can only recall two of the comics I received.  Sun Girl # 2, and Star Spangled #68.  Any way that's why there are so many coverless comics around today.

crashryan:
Rocket Riley has it right, but I'd like to add that it was easy accidentally to tear a cover loose. Until the dawn of the Collecting Age comics were tossed around, rolled into pockets, thrown onto shelves, and who knows what else. It took only a little bit of torque to tear a cover loose from one of the staples. Once that happened the cover was not long for this world. I've also seen comics on which rusted staples seem to have eaten through the cover paper.

erwin-k:
Rocket's right.


Back in the day I bought some 3/4 cover comics from Stan's Magazine Exchange. The ones I remember getting were Ace Comics' Super-Mystery & 4 Favorites.

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