 The comic's only distinctive feature was its American superhero strips, so "Fantastic" and "Terrific" (which most of the time contained "only" Marvel superhero strips) might loosely be described as clones of "Smash", even though they lacked any humour strips; but IPC had an "exclusive" licence from Marvel Comics to reprint Marvel's strips in the UK, which precluded anyone else from doing so.The actual answer lies in the unexpected nature of the economic crisis of 1968 that hit the British economy, resulting in the devaluation of the Pound.The economic chaos began with a Sterling crisis in Britain in 1967, leading to devaluation in the November.