STAMPED ON YOUR HEART: A REVIEW of the long-awaited book by Roy Thomas and the top-notch designers at Abrams ComicArts… By JIM BEARD Marvel Value Stamps: A Visual History really hit me where I live. And that’s in the past, by the way, which, yeah, is kinda sad, I know. But it’s all OK, because the comic book past is a truly wondrous thing, and when I have books like this to remind me of it, I’m a happy fanboy. Can we all just agree right here that Roy Thomas is now the undisputed living master of the Book Introduction? He’s a treasure trove of information, despite his claims of failing memory in his dotage, and the more we hear from him now about these great little corners of comic book history the better. Because, you know, like the great Marvel Bullpenners before him, he won’t be here forever (but books like these will). The first thing I realized when I was paging through this tome, published by Abrams ComicArts is that it immerses the viewer in history. You don’t just get some talk about what was going on back then at Marvel in the early 1970s and this crazy little stamp thing they did, you get a wall-to-wall museum experience. When Roy or the captions tell you something, you get to see it. And see it big and colorful. I love that. Like I said, immersive. You’ll notice I said “viewer” back there and not “reader.” That’s because, and I’m warning you now, this is essentially a picture book, not an exhaustive text tome. And that’s okay, too, because the pictures are gorgeous. What you get here is the entire lead-in and roll-out of the Marvel Value Stamp program from Roy the Boy, the next best thing to having Stan the Man here himself to educate us on this (and maybe more so, since Stan’s memory was allegedly the very worst). Then you get the pictures, which includes every single Value Stamp they did, and — this is one of the parts I love — where their images came from. I’m getting a little excited just typing this. Why? Because we get well over a hundred letters pages, too. That’s right, True Believer; if you like to read vintage comic book letters pages, you’re in luck, bunky, ‘cause...