Was reading an old comic the other day, and I noticed someone winning a no-prize on the letters page, and it got me curious. Anyone ever win one? If so, did you actually receive anything? Do you remember what won you the prize?
For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Marvel comics used to offer no-prizes for readers who spotted continuity errors in comic books, but were able to explain them away somehow (often with very contrived reasons). As far as I know, it was never revealed what a no-prize actually was, but they seemed to be fairly sought after.
I recall reading, in Rolling Stone’s cover story on Stan Lee and Marvel back in 1971, that the No Prize was at first literally nothing, but they later started sending out empty envelopes with “No Prize” stamped on them.
A no-prize was a slightly larger than #10 envelope with green markings received from Marvel comics. When you opened it up, there was nothing inside. In other words, no prize. It’s a joke, or at least it started as one - the contrived explanations for continuity errors weren’t something Marvel really wanted from readers, hence, they would receive “no prize” for their explanations. Somehow, the letter column geeks morphed that into a thing called a no prize and started demanding they receive their “no prize”. So someone - I’m guessing Stan Lee but it might have been one of the other editors - had the no-prize envelopes printed up and started sending them empty to people.
Never received one myself, but I had a brief stint working on Marvel projects as a very junior colorist and saw a number of the envelopes. Should have snagged a few as souvenirs, but, alas, I am too honest or something. Never one a no-prize, but I might have caused one being so new to the industry.
Never had one myself, but the guy who owned the comic shop I frequented back in the day had his “no prize” envelopes framed and mounted on the wall. Pretty cool.
I won quite a few of them. The envelopes had typical Stan Lee - authored hyperbole about the contents, and a little picture of the Hulk reading a comic book.
Marvel would also send out postcards thanking readers for their letters, often hand-writing replies to questions or whatnot.
I always thought it was above-and-beyond of them to take the time to acknowledge their correspondents that way.
There was a No Prize comic that collected abunch of the errors and for some time it was rumored that you would get a copy of that, but that wasn’t true. I got a copy of the Marvel Vault for Christmas a few years ago (so loved it and still do) which is a history of the company and also a bunch of replica items from the various eras. Sadly, the No Prize book is only a partial copy of the book. I need to really someday track down the actual original book.
I remember he used to be The Mad Maple until the editors decreed letter writers had to use “real” names. Also, that he had a metric fuckton of letters printed across various companies.
Interesting concept. GAMES magazine has a similar gimmick, in a column called “Laundry”. Given that GAMES offers logic puzzles, math and wordplay, it is possible to arrive at a better or more elegant* solution than what GAMES arrived it itself. First letter in to the Magazine gets an official recognition, complete with their answer posted, and a GAMES T-Shit.
*IIRC “elegant” is the actual word they use.
** I have never won, submitted, worked out, or even sought after a Laundry prize. I have a few Games Issues that I haven’t even taken a pencil to.
Back in the early Seventies, when I was 11 or so, my brothers and I got confused about some continuity issues in the Captain America/Falcon series, and we started calling the Marvel offices repeatedly, asking for an explanation. This is more than 37 years ago, so I don’t remember exactly what the issue was, but I DO recall that we made such pests of ourselves that they sent us a no-prize just so we’d go away and leave them alone.
As others have mentioned, the “no-prize” was just an empty envelope.
