Christmas and Archie

I didn't know that Archie Comics made tabloid sized anything! I appear to not be the only comics collector who felt this way. But earlier this year, I found this rare Archie holiday special from 1975 at my favorite thrift store. And I just had to add it to my Christmas comics collection!

I found the book for the price of $8. All of the games and puzzles were filled in. Some panels were graffitied with names and silly images. Plus the coloring pages were marked up too! All with red ink!

I took to my phone to find anything out about this book and other than an image of the cover, I found nothing! None of the databases I use had this book listed either. Later when I shared my find to the collector groups that I am a member of, those guys went nuts over my discovery. 

So despite all the markings, I think I did pretty good getting this for the price I did. 

There's 3 or 4 regular sized stories in this book. For the most part, they are all full of festive fun. Though one story felt like it was an non-holiday story that had patch put on top of the original dialogue with some Christmas key words.

None of these stories have any credits to the art and writing staff. So I'm not 100% sure that the stories were reprints or original material. My guess is based on the other tabloid books published around this time period, it's all reprinted material; probably from the late 60s to early 70s. 

Still this collection is a mystery to me. Archie Comics was, and still is, known for releasing it's reprinted material in tiny digest format. Christmas and Archie appears to be the publisher's only experiment with over-sized treasuries. 1975 was about when DC and Marvel introduced tabloid specials to market. Thus, it makes sense that Archie tried (and probably failed) to produce a line of tabloids of their own.

Christmas and Archie was a Santa's bag of holiday fun. I love having added it to my collection. But I will definitely be open to getting another unblemished copy added to my collection. Such a thing has to be for the right price of course.

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 8 out of 10 stars.