Spot The Differences

by Dario Bressanini

Do you know the “Spot the differences” game? You are given two very similar images and you must find all the, however subtle, differences between them.

Avengers #1

September 1963 was the cover date for issue #1 of The Avengers cover and story art by Jack, of course. [above] Here on the left is its famous cover. Before going to print, Stan Lee ordered a small change in the cover art, as in countless other cases: he asked to hide part of Thor’s cape. The cover as originally drawn by Kirby was shown in an ad in Fantastic Four #18 [center] Fantastic Four at the time was Marvel’s flagship publication, and ads were meant to alert the readers to new comics coming out.

To me, Jack rendition of Thor’s cape seems better, showing its right side. Maybe Stan Lee wanted to leave some space around The Wasp?

When I was a kid, I used to read Marvel comics translated in Italian, starting in 1971. A few decades later I started reading the reprints of the original comics, and occasionally I was puzzled looking at the cover art. Something seemed wrong often there were small and sometimes subtle changes to the cover I had memorized, impressed in my mind by the countless times I reread those stories. At top right is the Italian print of the cover taken from my own collection. The Avengers in Italy did not have, at the time, their own book. Instead they were published as the second story of the book Il Mitico Thor (The Mighty Thor), a 48-page book with usually two fulllength stories and a short one, usually “Tales of Asgard.”

For this reason, the covers were often printed as the internal pages. And the version they printed in the Italian comic book was the original cover as conceived by Kirby.

The same cover was later reprinted in the US in the Marvel Masterworks series.

Avengers #2

Below is Marvel’s house ad for The Avengers #2, and on the next page is the original cover (on the left) and the one reprinted in the Marvel Masterworks book (in the center). Can you spot the differences, apart from the different colors?

In the Marvel Masterworks cover (center):

1) The giant green arrow pointing at Giant Man is slightly bigger.

2) The blue sign above Thor is bigger, and touches the green arrow.

3) The right edge of the right window is slightly displaced to the right. It is hard to see, but notice that the bricks touching the window’s edge are shorter.

4) Although all the characters are identical, there is an additional shadow for the