NO-PRIZE

A 'No-Prize' is traditionally a fan's reward for getting a letter printed in a Marvel comic that points out a mistake and comes up with a clever excuse for the mistake being there. Stan Lee would print the letter and tell the writer they had won a No-Prize - which was nothing.
Readers wrote in asking where their No-Prize was. Marvel began sending empty envelopes that explained that the No-Prize was inside.
During his tenure as editor of the Avengers line of books, Mark Gruenwald became tired of the type of No-Prize requests that were coming in. In three "Mark's Remarks" columns in issues cover-dated July 1986, he informed readers that his office would no longer award No-Prizes to anyone. He explained that people were now really nit-picking at books to try to find things they could get No-Prizes for, and it went against the original idea. Instead of pointing out major continuity errors and proposing explanations for them, readers were writing in about minor colouring mistakes and the like.[1]
Other editors also revealed their policies on No-Prizes: for example, then-Daredevil editor Ralph Macchio awarded them to anyone who asked for one, while Mike Higgins didn't award any at all. There was no company-wide policy on the awarding of the empty envelopes.[2]
Later, the overall No-Prize policy was changed so that the only way one could get a No-Prize was through the Stan's Soapbox column appearing in many Marvel comics. Stan Lee awarded them to anyone whose letter he prints in the column, or to those who solved occasional research challenges.
No-Prize sending was never all that regular--it waxed and waned all through the years--but it pretty much stopped completely when Gruenwald passed, aside from the Stan's Soapbox awards.
On July 31st, 2006, Marvel Executive Editor Tom Brevoort instituted the digital No-Prize to be awarded for "Meritorious Service to Marveldom" and the first of these was awarded on August 12th, 2006 to a group of Marvel fans who donated a large number of comics to U.S. service members stationed in Iraq. [3]
The British ZX Spectrum oriented magazine Your Sinclair had a similar prize, called the Trainspotter award, that was awarded to readers who wrote in to nit-pick mistakes in articles, magazine cover artwork and so on. The editors of the magazine would try to weasel their way out of trouble with explanations of the mistakes found, but sometimes this only led to more inconsistencies. The most notorious example of this was the cover art for Issue 41 that was inspired by Outrun Europa. The cover art depicted the driver of the car in the right hand seat, but the setting for the scene was Paris, as evidenced by the Eifel Tower in the background. In France the driver's seat is on the left hand side of the car. The controversy over the mistakes in this cover raged for months, with editorial explanations growing ever more contrived until they eventually gave up.

Contents

References

References

★ 1999 rec.arts.comics.marvel.universe FAQ
1, 2 Mark's Remarks Index

★ Newsarama article