A few months ago Friend o'the Archive Jason Rhodes sent along some intriguing scans from a Mexican licensed set of comics that feature images taken from the 1966 Superman In The Jungle release. SITJ is one of the more legendary U.S. test issues unleashed by Topps, fueled by both the superhero connection and extreme scarcity. The PSA registry count is quite low, with 120 total subjects graded, of which 110 are proofs, and where I assume the latter are all blank-backed. It's not quite as bad as those figures indicate as a number of off-register and/or hand crudely hand cut "finished" examples have survived that don't really merit being slabbed, but the rarity of these is up there.
Here is the U.S. version, in the aforementioned hand cut shape.
The reverse features a well done design IMO:
The set saw a full UK retail release, seemingly in 1968, licensed by A&BC, which is easily found and well-known to collectors. However, as it turns out a Mexican set, shrunk down to comic size - and presumably minus some subjects - was also issued by Topps of Mexico. The wrapper is fantastic:
These were Bazooka penny tab-sized but they are quite a departure from Bazooka Joe, no?
Here's an A&BC card (no. 17) titled "Escape By X-Ray":
And here is the corresponding comic strip from Mexico:
It lacks the vivid colors of the card set but for a wax comic it looks pretty sweet. The translation of the bottom text, according to Google, reads "The man of steel had an idea, he used a burst of x-rays and the beast escaped scared." Did you know that "panther" in Spanish is "pantera"? Well, it was news to the folks as Para Topps Mexico!
Here's a couple more for your viewing pleasure, nos. 20 and 32, respectively:
Jason unearthed fourteen subjects: 2,5,7,8,15,16,17,20,30,31,32,33,39,40.
The Bazooka one cent comic set counts from 1966-68 were 42 (14x3) in all years. I'm not sure that it's safe to assume a similar number of subjects here but the known SITJ comics count suggests the possibility.
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