One reason Golden Age comics are so valuable is that many of them were pulped due to recycling efforts during World War II. And one reason so many of them were pulped in the first place might just be due to pleas in the comics themselves that readers salvage paper because “every scrap of paper you can collect goes into immediate war production!”

As you can see from a wartime run of Captain Marvel, Jr., each issue from June 1944 through March 1946 included a shout-out on page 3 from “the world’s mightiest boy” for readers to do their part to help win the war.

(Apologies for the culturally insensitive nature of that first such example, which unfortunately was not out of line with the standards of the ’40s.)

If only readers had ignored the urgings of Captain Marvel, Jr. and other superheroes of the time, perhaps (to give just one example) more than 100 copies of Action #1 might still exist today. But as they say … War is Hell.