RCheli

I'm a rinky-dink dealer, and I was going to do Keystone this year, but even if it isn't canceled, I'm 99% sure I won't be there. Obviously my health and the health of the people who would be with me (and my family and their families) are incredibly important and I don't want anyone to get this virus. That being said, attendance will certainly be significantly lower than in the past, whether it's due to the virus fears or restrictions on how many people can be in the hall at any one time. Add that to the depressed economy that you spoke of, what's the benefit of doing it?

These were not just sold overseas. If that were the case, there would be barely any copies available -- who's bringing back their comics after 9 months in Germany. Do we even see many copies of these books for sale in Europe?

Of the two I found, one went to CGC and was graded without any restoration. I would hope they would be able to detect something like that.

I usually take what most people say on Facebook (whether comics or otherwise) with a grain of salt, because there is just so much misinformation out there. So here it goes... Someone posted in one of the groups I follow a nice group of MJ comics, including some key DCs (Swamp Thing #20 and #21). I see many less DCs than Marvels, so I got excited. Another person pointed out that these MJIs were also sold at Macy's and Woolworths. While I'm certainly not an expert like some of you, in all my years of collecting, I've never heard this before. Is this true? Or was it just another case of a Facebook poster not knowing the truth. Edit: They said that it was to tie in with the Mark Jeweler jewelry that was sold there.

I searched for information on these, but I haven't found anything. So I figured I'd ask you smart people... I've been cataloging my books during these nutty times, and I came upon a handful of Disney Gladstone-era books that had "Disney Comics Distributed by Marvel" in the logo box. Does anything know where these were sold? Newsstands? Disney theme parks? (In no way do I think that they're more valuable or anything.) Thanks.

@FlyingDonut grabbed the other one. It was the strangest thing I've ever come across in my comic life. It was OBVIOUSLY some sort of error when they put the three parts together (the cover, guts, and insert), but I wonder if other DD #231 Canadians had the same mistake. Edited to put in the correct issue #.

Final price drop to $60! Come on, people! Somebody must want some comics to read!

Now $70! Cheaper than that dime store floozie!

Final drop to $60! That's like 25 cents per comic! Sure, we all know that post-Unity Valiants are, for the most part, not going to be high-value books. But they were still pretty entertaining reads, am I right? This is for 242 different Valiants -- about 1/3 of all the first Valiants published -- shipped to your home (in the US -- it will cost more elsewhere) for just $60! That's less than 25 cents per comic! Sure, that's probably close to what you'd pay for them in a shop or at a con, but this is a great starter collection of a large portion of them. There are no keys in here -- they've been bought already. But there may be some keys to come, if some of these movies start getting made. All comics are in VF/NM condition. Here's what you get: Archer & Armstrong 1-25 Bloodshot 0, 1-5, 8-12, 14-16, 18-19, Yearbook 1 Chaos Effect Alpha Deathmate Prologue, Blue, Yellow Eternal Warrior 1-3, 6-7, 9-25, Yearbook 1 Hard Corps 1-20 Harbinger 0 (the one that came with the trade paperback), 8-27, 29-31, Files 1 Magnus Robot Fighter 15-35, 37-39 Ninjak 1-4, 7 Rai/and Future Force 6-23, Companion 1 Second Life of Doctor Mirage 1-12 Secret Weapons 1-11 Shadowman 0, 4-5, 7-12, 14-29, 31 Solar 12-13, 25, 29, 34 Turok 2-14, Yearbook 1 Unity 0, 1 Valiant Reader 1 Valiant Vision Starter Kit nn X-O Manowar 7-8, 14, 24-25, 28-30 The comics will be bagged -- 4 to a bag with a backing board in the middle -- and shipped in this long box. Payment by PayPal. If you live close to Philly, I can drop this off and I'll reduce the cost by $20. Returns are accepted, though after getting this wonder box, I don't know why you'd ever want to send it back! Again, it's $60 for all those comics, with no extra charge for shipping! YOU CAN'T BEAT THAT, MY FRIENDS!

A lot of the cheaper reprints just take scans of the actual comic pages and end it there, and they don't recolor or do much touchups. That makes them seem more authentic, for sure, but it also makes things messy and more difficult to read.

There was a lot of ways that they made reprints of these older comics. For a lot, there were photostats available. Comic companies have been reprinting stories forever, and I suspect nearly none of them are made from the original art. I mean, when DC published the Famous First Editions in the 70s, they certainly didn't have the original art still available. For others, if they didn't have photostats or plates any more of the originals, they would use photostats of the later reprints. (You can see in a couple of instances where they missed a "Continued in the next issue of Marvel Tales" and not Amazing Spider-Man.) And with others -- most notably the early DC Archives -- they physically bleached the color out of actual Golden Age Comics, rescanned it, made a photostat, recolored and printed. Thankfully, they don't have to do that any more. Those poor comics... Now they tend to do it all by computer. They take a scan of the comic page, drop out the color, clean up the lines, and recolor digitally. It's a painstaking process for sure, and if the proper time isn't taken, it looks terrible. (Some of those IDW reprints of newspaper strips are atrocious because of the slapdash way they scan the newsprint.)

I agree to a point, but how many great characters were created outside of Marvel/DC by former company regulars? Doug Moench had Sabre. Grell had Jon Sable. Marshal Rogers had Cap'n Quick and a Foozle. Can you count Starlin and Dreadstar (which pretty much was Captain Marvel)? Roy Thomas had Blue Bolt and Lightning (was that was it was called?), but who else did he create? Steve Gerber had Nevada, which I liked, but that was decades after his hey-day. Some creators need to have a bedrock of an already-created character or of an editor with a heavy hand in reigning everything in.

I'd take this, but I don't think the price isn't right....

I love all these treasuries -- thanks for sharing. I was wondering what people see as the most common/least common titles out there? The ones I have seen the most are the Star Wars #1 and #2 and the Conan with the white cover (I believe it's #4). The third Fantastic Four issue (I think it's #21) is one that I haven't seen in person in years.

I think you're right, but unless we get the details of when every issue was actually sent to the printer, we'll probably never know. It's a shame that for decades Whitmans were seen as the red-headed stepchild of comics, or we may have had more accurate information about their distribution. I know that when I started really collecting in the early 80s, if I had a choice between a Whitman and a non-Whitman, I would never choose the one with the "W" in the corner. Never! The other problem is that, of course, Western stopped publishing with any real regularity by 1980, and seemed to only print when they had sold through their available multi-packs. We can't really trust their indicia when it came to actual printing or on-sale dates those last 5 or so years.

LAME! (This is as bad as the new Cracker Jack prizes.)

Right, but were they printed all at the same time or were they printed every month like their indicia indicates? I don't know if we'll ever be able to answer that question.

Oh, I don't either. One doesn't make it a second print or first. It's all the same. I just was thinking about why one would have brighter colors. Pence/Whitman/Test Price/Newsstand/Direct... if the insides were all printed at the same time, they're all first printings to me.

What's the free prize?

I have heard people say that the colors on the Silver Age pence copies were brighter so that meant that they were printed first. I don't know if that's true or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was. Why, you ask? Well, printers often give you quotes with a +/- 10% number. It takes a lot to start/stop these presses -- especially older ones from the 1960s. You don't just put a number in a computer and press a button. The print masters are eying this up. They know, generally speaking, how many can be printed every minute, and they're guessing when to stop the run. You say you want the print run to be 100,000, you can get 90,000 or you can get 110,000. (This is not true with digital printing, which prints to a specific number and usually overprints at a much smaller amount, and that's mostly due to having some extras due to bad printing/cuts/tears/etc.) So if Fantastic Four #15 had a pence and a US version. if they're going to over or under print, at the end, it's going to be for the version that has the most copies. There were (again, I don't know the real numbers, but this is a guess) 10,000 pence and 190,000 cent. They run the 10,000, stop the press, change the screen, run 190,000, run a few more for your overage. I have no idea if this is how they did it, of course. But this is based on working in advertising for a long time, and going to the places where they had these HUGE offset printing presses, but I suspect that's why they did the pence first.

Whitman had a lot of multi-issue packs from publishers other than Marvel, of course: Battle of the Planets, the Black Hole, etc. And even though the issues in those packs had different publication months, I am not knowledgeable enough to know if they were actually printed at different times (so was Battle of the Planets #7 which has a date of October 1980 actually printed a month before #8 which has a date of November 1980). If they were printed at different times (which I suspect), then Whitman would certainly have a warehouse capable of holding onto numbers issues of a single title and then packaging them together when they had 3 copies available.

This is a great point, though. Marvel was in the printing business. Seuling, Whitman, and the local companies were in charge of distribution. In theory, Marvel would be happy to reprint any comic at any time if some company was willing to pay for them. But Whitman wasn't stupid. They had a very successful business model, and knew what they had to pay per book to make money, and a special printing with a low circulation would be cost prohibitive.

Sure they were. They were selling $1.20 worth of comics for $1.09.

But Proctor and Gamble paid for those reprints as part of a giveaway. It's not the same thing. And I'm not saying it's difficult to go back to press. You could reprint the same comic every month if you wanted (though the plates would get worn down). I'm saying it's expensive. Edit: remember, with giveaways, they're not looking to make money. It's for advertising. Western wanted to make money!

I don't want to come off as some know-it-all, but if those books were reprints, Whitman/Western would be losing money on every multipack sold. You did not print four color comics in the 70s with print runs of less than 200,000 copies. And the same goes for reprints. Setting up the printers was time consuming and costly, and if they reprinted a comic for the Whitman market, with a print run of only 20,000 copies, the per copy price would be more than what you'd sell it for. Add to the fact that you're not getting any ad revenue (why would advertisers pay for an ad 6 months later?), it makes no sense. These were not reprints. Pence copies were not reprints. Test price copies were not reprints.