We have here a message from George Wyman that I received yesterday…
Thank you for telling us that today is the 50th anniversary of Fantastic Four #1 going on sale. I'm sure there's a reason for this but could you explain to me why it says November on the cover?
Sure. What you need to understand is that magazines are distributed via a system whereby unpurchased product is returnable. Your local newsstand (assuming you even have a local newsstand) gets in 25 copies of the new issue of Cream Cheese Monthly. Over the course of the month, they sell 11 copies. When the new issue of Cream Cheese Monthly comes in, they ship back the remaining 14 copies and they get credit for them.
When this procedure was devised, it became standard to put the off-sale date (i.e., the date when it would be time to return unsold copies) on the cover. This also, in theory, made the magazine seem more au courant to potential purchasers. Let's say an issue went on sale the third week of May. That meant it would still be the current issue throughout much of June…but publishers feared that if buyers saw May on the cover when it said June on the calendar, they might think, "Oh, this is last month's issue. I probably already bought this." Or maybe they'd figure the contents were out of date — old news, expired coupons, etc.
So they'd put the date of the following issue on the cover for these two reasons. Crafty publishers might decide to try and gain a bit more sales advantage by padding the date even further. In so doing, they hoped newsstands would keep an issue on sale even longer…and comic book publishers pushed this as far as they could. They'd have a bi-monthly comic come out in January, which meant it went off-sale in March…but they'd put April on the cover or even May or June if they thought they could get away with it. More time on the racks could mean more copies sold before the unsold copies were yanked off and returned.
Most newsstands didn't fall for this. In fact, at times when a retailer didn't have enough display space for all the comics that were coming in, he might return unsold copies of, say, Detective Comics well before the printed off-sale month or even before the next issue arrived. One newsstand where I bought comics in the sixties had so little room that nothing stayed on sale for more than a week. When the new comics came in, the operator would clear out and return all his unsold product to make way for the new. But some newsstands were large enough (or their proprietors inattentive enough) that the post-dating kept some books on the racks a little longer. In any case, it didn't hurt the publisher to advance the date like that.
The first issue of Fantastic Four hit the stands on August 8, 1961. It was a bi-monthly so the next issue would come out in or about the first week of October. In the hope that some dealers would not return their copies when that next issue arrived, Marvel then had all their dates advanced a month…ergo, November. This also helped a bit when a comic was cancelled. If no next issue arrived to displace it, the last issue might really stay on the stands until its cover date.
It doesn't matter as much with comics these days since most are sold via non-returnable means but it's still a custom in magazine distribution. The current issue of Newsweek — the one with the glassy-eyed picture of Michele Bachmann on the cover — is cover-dated August 15.