BHOC: FUN AND GAMES MAGAZINE #1

This shows you just how in the tank i was for Marvel at this point. The next time I visited the Stationery Store that had become my main outlet for buying new comics, this book was situated among the other stacks on the shelf. Despite the fact that it wasn’t a comic book at all (though it was in the comic book format) and cost a dime more than a typical Marvel book of the time (albeit with no ads whatsoever) I went ahead and purchased it. And not just this issue–I wound up buying the first three before I eventually relented. So why was this? Well, I’d fallen under the spell of the completist mentality; I figured that if I passed up on some new book and it turned out that for some reason I wanted it later, I’d wind up potentially paying exorbitant prices for it. It was easier to just take the leap and dive in. And that’s what I did on a bunch of things, not just FUN AND GAMES MAGAZINE.

At the time, Marvel was looking to branch out in a number of different ways. They’d had great accidental success in licensing STAR WARS, so the company wound up doing movie adaptations of everything they could get their hands on. They also struck a deal to distribute comics based on the Hanna Barbera cartoon properties, and launched a DYNAMITE-style kids magazine, PIZZAZZ. Still in the wings was a HEAVY METAL-influenced fantasy magazine on slick paper, EPIC ILLUSTRATED. Marvel’s former parent company, Magazine Management, had long had success publishing crossword puzzle magazines and the like, and a line of licensed books featuring Marvel-themed puzzles and games had been something of a success. So I suspect this was the reason for FUN AND GAMES MAGAZINE, an attempt to tap into an existing market. In 1979, the mainstream “newsstand” distribution model was still the lifeblood of the industry, although that would change over the next decade. And FUN AND GAMES was a perfect impulse purchase for a young kid on a shopping trip.

FUN AND GAMES MAGAZINE was almost entirely put together by Owen McCarron, who designed all of the puzzles and wrote all of the content. A Canadian, McCarron had established himself in the world of puzzle design, having a regular column in the newspapers distributed by Halifax Herald Limited. he also expanded his efforts into the American marketplace as a packager of promotional comic books. It was apparently McCarron who approached his friend, Marvel publisher Stan Lee, with the idea of syndicating a puzzle strip featuring marvel characters. Not only did Stan license him those rights, but he also hired him on to write and edit FUN AND GAMES as a monthly periodical, and gave him virtual card blanche to do so.

The magazine wasn’t a huge success and only ran for a year, but there was a paperback collection issued collecting an assortment of the material created for it that remained in print for much of the decade. McCarron’s puzzles ranged from the generic to the granular. This Hulk puzzle from the first issue, for example, relies on a reader having a working knowledge of the Hulk’s publishing history. Not every game was aimed at a hardcore comic book fan like this, but some of them were.

In addition, McCarron would occasionally include content that wasn’t specifically a puzzle or a game, but more an opportunity for creative play, such as this Design a Marvel Super Hero spread in this first issue.

Most of the artwork in the book was produced by McCarron as well, though he often availed himself of pick-up pieces by other artists, as in the case of these Storm figures by Dave Cockrum. McCarron didn’t just stick to the most well-known characters either, he plumed the depths of Marvel’s publishing line to find interesting figures to base puzzles around. One page in this initial issue focuses on the Living Eraser, an obscure villain who had only made two previous appearances.

So for all that it was only a limited success, there is something interesting about FUN AND GAMES MAGAZINE, and that may have been what kept me coming back for the first three issues. Or I may just have been a stupid kid with poor impulse-control–especially since I never actually did any of the puzzles or mazes or games in these issues, not outside of my head anyway.