Prince Namor

On 5/19/2024 at 8:45 AM, Zonker said:

No, I don't think so.  Speculators who outright bought comics in bulk would presumably have had those recorded as sales, and so would not contribute to the cancellation of books like GL/GA, Kirby's 4th World, Adams X-Men, Deadman, etc.  Instead, the claim has been made that early would-be comics dealers were scarfing up books they got through the back door at vastly under cover price, the fruits of affidavit fraud.   And they picked which books to stockpile based on the rock-star-artist as collectible trend (which is where the speculation aspect comes into play).

And because a newsstand dealer isn't actually paying for the issues (thus the fraud), he can sell those in bulk for whatever he can get. 

If some wanna-be comic book dealer who is going to shows and setting up, buys 1000 copies of New Gods #1 for 8 cents each, and then sells it at shows for 20 cents - at least - he's making 12 cents per book - that $120 in 1970, the equivalent of $969 today. You do that with enough hot books...

It's the same kind of thing people were doing at Capital Distribution before they shut down... buying copies of hot books right out the back door in bulk prices from employees that were stealing from the company. 

'Wherever there's an opportunity, there will be fraudsters.'

On 5/19/2024 at 9:33 AM, Hepcat said:

Okay. Since I'm more of a DC fan and collector than anything else, I'm not going to disagree.

But!!! How do you explain that the vast majority of Silver and Bronze Age comic collectors today are first and foremost collectors of Marvel titles? How did that come about? I think it grew out of Stan Lee's efforts to foster Real Frantic Ones, i.e. a rabid fan base that hoarded Marvel titles.

Not denying that at all. 

For books released in January 1970 until May of 1971, it's interesting to see how many are on the census (even though the census has zero to do with the Statement of Publication numbers), but just in terms of the popularity... this list is incomplete, but it does include all the Spider-man issues 83-99 and FF and Thor and Iron Man...

Conan #1 - 6411

Batman #232 - 3820

GL/GA #76 -2872

New Gods #1 - 2775

Forever People #1 - 2668

FF #112 - 2491

Batman #227 - 2432

Jimmy Olsen #134 - 2397

GL/GA #87 - 2386

ASM #97 - 2173

ASM #98 - 2038

Mr. Miracle - 1918

Batman #234 - 1957

Detective Comics #400 - 1587

Superman #233 - 1532

Hulk #141 - 1484

Conan #3 - 1343

Avengers #87 - 1233

Detective Comics #411 - 1156

Avengers #83 - 1149

On 5/18/2024 at 3:44 AM, Hepcat said:

That is correct. Superhero comics didn't dominate newsstands back in the day.

Those sales numbers are essentially accurate. There's no reason to expect them to reflect the titles that are most highly prized by collectors today. Quite simply today's collector market largely grew out of the niche of MMMS members Stan Lee generated. Sure comic collectors existed before then, but the Marvel Universe MYTH that Stan Lee created resulted in a quantum leap in the number of a rabid  group of hardcore collectors. Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger also had a hand in fostering this (hunh?) but Stan was nonetheless the Man when it came to encouraging comic buyers to hoard comics.

FTFY

After Marvel never led in sales throughout the entire decade of the 60's... including 1970 and 1971... it took the creation of the direct market, the glutting of reprints and the inability of comics to hold the newsstand interest vs the price, to even give Marvel a chance...and finally the complete collapse of any common sense by DC Comics in pricing themselves - once at 25 cents for a year vs Marvel's 20 cents but then a second time a year later with their 60 page Giants priced at 60 cents, before finally conceding to let them drop to 50 cents - before Marvel could finally say, "Hey look at us! We're number one!"

Hey, they had their rabid fan base to keep them going.

Still... at that point it was like saying, "Look at us! We're less inept than the rest of the industry!" 

They sure showed DC Comics!

Meanwhile... DC Comics had the Top Rated Batman TV Show from 1966-67 (and in syndication for years after) -  The Super Friends TV Cartoon in 1973, and then in some form from 1977 to 1985, The Box Office success of FOUR Superman movies from 1978 to 1987 - Batman TV Cartoons that ran from 1968 to 1977 - The Box Office success of FOUR Batman movies that ran from 1989 to 1997 - The AWARD WINNING Batman the Animated Series TV Cartoon that ran from 1992 to 1995... Heck, they were REBOOTING a second Batman series when Marvel got their movie situation finally going....

All while DC Comics rebuilt their comic company and produced most of the better comics of the mid/late 80's into the 90's... Dark Knight Returns, Batman Year One, Watchmen, Sandman, Preacher, Hellblazer, etc....

Whenever I hear people talk about Stan Lee 'saving comics' or 'making it all more popular', I just think... What??? Comics were ALREADY popular in the early 60's. Superhero Fanzines began BEFORE FF#1 came out. People were already writing to Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger before they ever knew Stan Lee existed. Superman averaged 823,829 comics sold per month in 1965 (the year BEFORE the Batman TV Show), which wasn't much different than the 810,000 comics sold per month that the book averaged in 1960. (The other 6 Superman Family titles averaged a combined 3 million in sales).

Their Top 8 titles per year, would continue to beat Marvel's Top 8 titles per year through 1973 (at that pint only by about 160,000 total copies...).

And not long after, both DC and Marvel were on the brink of going bankrupt in the late 70's, early 80's... Star Wars and the Direct Market saved Marvel, not Stan Lee. HE did what he did best - he sold STAN LEE as a brand to the fans, who kept on collecting on the SECONDARY market. But Marvel was able to regroup and slowly win back some of them... New fans came on board because of the creative talent - Miller, Byrne, Simonson, etc. - while the diehards eagerly scooped up Secret Wars or whatever garbage Marvel threw at them with 'Stan Lee Presents' on it. Collectibility... NOT content, was Marvel's real goal. 

As far as comic books go... it hasn't aged well. 

On 5/18/2024 at 3:44 AM, Hepcat said:

Today's comic collecting community can trace its origins to the Real Frantic Ones who bought Marvel comics from the Silver Age to the early Bronze Age. The few collectors who were drawn into comic fandom by "Duck" and other Dell comics in the 1950's are a small and ever decreasing niche. The genres from the 1940's and 1950's that have seen the most growth in demand in the last fifty years are precisely those titles that most appeal to today's rapidly aging Marvel Zombie contingent, e.g. crime and horror. Though I find this sad, it's undeniable.

The portion of the collecting community that is about 'reading' is probably as small as it's ever been. 

On 5/18/2024 at 8:42 AM, Hepcat said:

Of course there was affidavit fraud. That's just human nature. Wherever there's an opportunity, there will be fraudsters.

But it's a huge logical leap to assume that certain titles were being hit by affidavit fraud much more than others. That's the part of your case that needs to be substantiated by very strong evidence.

Strong evidence? You said it yourself: 'Wherever there's an opportunity, there will be fraudsters.'

Even today, what do the fraudsters go after? The books most in demand. 

It's 'human nature'.

It's weird how nostalgia and talking about different things can make you remember something that is completely forgotten...

Tin Tin was something I didn't read until much later... probably the mid-90's, but it reminded me of something that I couldn't quite... put together that I read in the mid-70's. I didn't have the research tools in the mid-90's that I do now of course, so someone mentioning it, made me do some searching and...

Does anyone remember Trots and Bonnie from National Lampoon?

Wow...  I went and did some research on this and... man, was it controversial.... yet relatively unknown! It's probably what influenced my interest in alternative/independant comics of the 90's (I also didn't get into Crumb and the others until then). Some of it is probably offensive by today's standard's, but as 12-13 year old kid in the 70's, my eyes were wide open. No way it would've been printed in a regular comic at the time...

Spoilered.... to keep from 'offending' anyone...

On 5/16/2024 at 2:07 AM, Brock said:

On the Richie Rich front, my friends an I really got into collecting about 2 or 3 years after these figures. We were all DC guys (my favourites were Justice League and Brave & Bold), but we also all read Richie Rich. Star Wars broke the DC monopoly, and we slowly started reading Marvel as well. By the time of Micronauts, we were Marvel converts, and probably gave up Richie Rich as we made that transition.

People forget how big Richie Rich was. Harvey had at one time in the 70's, like 5 different Richie Rich comics.

On 5/16/2024 at 2:07 AM, Brock said:

Archies were everywhere, but they were "girl" comics. My younger sister had hundreds of them, and I read them all, but I didn't know any boys who bought Archies.

Never heard that. The whole premise of Archie is him having the hots for any attractive girl that he sees. 

On 5/14/2024 at 6:18 PM, ganni said:

Looking at the lists.  Its like DC Jack KIrby's  Fourth world never existed in this time line.

Well, except for Jimmy Olsen which was the beginning of the 4th World. The others wouldn't have made this list anyway. Or the next one.

1972 would cover roughly July/August of 1971 to July/August of 1972. They were only on their fourth issue by then and wouldn't have had a Statement of Publication anyway. 

Most of the publisher's did not add new titles going into the 70's. Marvel added... none until Ghost Rider and Spider Woman in 1979.

Never saw a Statement of Publication in the 70's for Tomb of Dracula, Defenders, Captain Marvel, IRON MAN, Marvel Team-Up, Marvel Two-In-One, Master of Kung Fu, Werewolf by Night.... so it wasn't uncommon. 

If anyone runs into one for any of these, please let me know. 

Not sure about the Doctor Strange, but as I edit these things I'm making my corrections. Detective has been added, but yeah, sales weren't so great.

Couple of notes: This is from Total Paid Circulation

There'd be no reason to INFLATE numbers, as that would open a business up to being audited if it didn't match up. It is a FELONY to falsify postal records. 

These are from books printed that came out in January/February 1971. Date of report October 1st, 1970. So for books released, roughly, from August of 1969 to August of 1970, which would include Green Lantern #72 to Green Lantern #81 (4 issues without and 6 issues WITH Adams). Yes, the report is from Green Lantern #83.

It would be very interesting to see what Marvel's reprint book numbers were. Haven't seen a single one yet, other than when Sgt. Fury was every other reprint and it's numbers were strong.

As far as the validity of these numbers, Giordano wasn't the person making these reports - for Charlton, it was John Santangelo and his son, the owner and publisher. So if he was falsifying records, that would've been on him. Charlton, by this time, had such a small impact in the market, they only did a handful of reports any way, so it doesn't make much difference. 

At DC, again, it wouldn't have been Giordano who had anything to do with filing these reports. You can read who it is: in this case Bernard Kashdan, who'd been in the accounting department at DC Comics since the 40's. (He was the brother of editor/writer George Kashdan. 

Having dealt with these numbers over a period of two decades - 1960 to 1979 - there are certain consistencies you can see that wipe out any number polishing - these people had no idea these numbers would be viewed side to side and examined in a way to see if they hold up... when the price of comics goes up, you can see the numbers sag evenly across the board - when a John Byrne takes over the FF, you can see the numbers go up... so across the board, with a sample size this big - the validity of most of these numbers stands up really well.

And the idea that DC would fudge their numbers and someone like Stan Lee WOULDN'T is just typical 'my team is better' nonsense. If one publisher was doing it, they all would've. It was only a FELONY. 

But as for how they stack up overall across the history of them being posted... hey, I'll let the expert answer that (John Jackson Miller) from his web site comichron.com: 

Q: How valid is the information in comic book Statements of Ownership? 

A: Validity differs from reliability in that it answers the question, "is this statistic really reporting what it says it is?" And whether Statements are telling the real sales truth has been a subject of debate for many years, since fans started collecting them in the 1960s as a means of figuring out which comics were selling the best. It's a federal crime to falsify the numbers — so, in theory, you might expect the information to be accurate. But there have been cases where negligence or misunderstanding led to errors in the Statements — and there have been many occasions where computational errors have crept in. (Easily rectified errors have been corrected for the Comics Chronicles reports.) 

While there have been suspicions from time to time of publishers fiddling with their Statements to improve their numbers or because of apathy — MR. Giordano said that Charlton simply "made them up" during his editorship in the late 1960s — little evidence has been found of it being widespread, especially as other sources of comics circulation figures have become available for comparison. Gross exaggeration would have to be done uniformly across time and across several information channels not to be seen.

And, the filing of Statements is, again, a postal obligation, usually more of a bookkeeping afterthought than an opportunity to market a publisher's sales story. It's the advertisers who care most about how many copies publishers are selling — and those people are getting their information from audit bureaus, not the backs of comic books! 

For those who DON'T believe there was affidavit fraud... Charlton's Cheyenne Kid outsold a Neal Adams Green Lantern...

Heck they won't believe it NOW! They'll make up some excuse!

 In the process of writing TWO books at once so... sorry if I've gotten behind here (one of them with a deadline)... hope this helps in the meantime!

In the process of writing TWO books at once so... sorry if I've gotten behind here... hope this helps!

On 4/27/2024 at 5:03 AM, Zonker said:

Mark Evanier & Steve Sherman certainly were no Stan Lees.  

"Many of our other readers are no better off than you."
"You can hardly expect to understand everything by the end of the second issue."
"No one ever said comic books were easy to understand."

If Stan were plugging this, he'd be congratulating us all on how intelligent we were to be following this saga, a work of unparalleled genius in the annals of literary masterpieces.  And inviting us discerning readers to write in with our own theories as to what was going on or what would be happening next, in order to share how very smart we were with our fellow sophisticated comics connoisseurs.  

True.

But personally, I never needed anyone to congratulate me on what I could figure out for myself though. And one too many Marvel issues promising me 'The Greatest Story You'll Ever Read!', only to be sorely disappointed in a... well, in a nowhere NEAR great story (or art) much less EVER... and I knew pretty quickly I didn't want to be a part of any cult that followed a boy who cried wolf. 

Gerry Conway's disappointing conclusion to the Jackel/Gwen Clone Saga in ASM #149 (July 1975) - mandated by Stan's 'Bring Gwen back!' - had left me shaking my head like... wtf was THAT? - while at the same time Jim Starlin disappearing from Captain Marvel and Strange Tales (I didn't know they gave Warlock his own book until almost 10 years later) put me on somewhat of a hiatus from comics for the next 8 years... I wasn't impressed with the gimmicky way Marvel sold books or how my favorite artists never seemed to stick around...

I came back strong in the mid-80's with ASM #249's cover making me wonder who was this Green Goblin in an Orange Costume and the mystery again held me for a few years until... they dropped the ball on THAT storyline as well. For ME, the Stan Lee way of doing comics - it's the Greatest! It's Collectible! You're SO smart! - was just a big disappointment. It felt like being talked to like a child.

It worked I guess though. For people SELLING those books - I'm sure it was great - but I was a reader who was a fan of the art - and the superhero books just didn't hold my attention. 

Thankfully alternative comics DID (including Vertigo). That kept me in it more than anything throughout the 90's... no promises needed there. I found what I liked. 

I know someone who is in contact with Andy and... he doesn't really want the controversy, but he has been made aware of what's going on with all of this. 

And yes, that WOULD be a cool signature to have!

ON NEWSSTANDS FEBRUARY 1971

Forever People #2 - 

ON NEWSSTANDS FEBRUARY 1971

Forever People #2 - Written, Drawn and Edited by Jack Kirby (inked by the horrible Vince Colletta)

Cover by Jack Kirby (inks by Colletta)

Part TWO:

ON NEWSSTANDS FEBRUARY 1971

Forever People #2 - Written, Drawn and Edited by Jack Kirby (inked by the horrible Vince Colletta)

Cover by Jack Kirby (inks by Colletta)

Part ONE:

ON NEWSSTANDS JULY 1964

Tales of Suspense #58 - Lee, Heck, Ayers, and Rosen

Oh for God's Sake...

ON NEWSSTANDS JULY 1964

Tales of Suspense #58 - Lee, Heck, Ayers, and Rosen

'Iron Man AND Captain America are Dunces' (i.e. an excuse for poor writing)'.

#6: Double DUH.

ON NEWSSTANDS JULY 1964

Tales of Suspense #58 - Lee, Heck, Ayers, and Rosen

'Iron Man is a Dunce' (i.e. an excuse for poor writing)'... #5: Iron Man's man Armor is the hardest iron alloy known to man, but the 'Chameleon' holds his own against him and he can't figure out that maybe it's actually Cap...

ON NEWSSTANDS JULY 1964

Tales of Suspense #58 - Lee, Heck, Ayers, and Rosen

Especially going to call this issue, 'Iron Man is a Dunce' (i.e. an excuse for poor writing)'.

#4: This Dimwitted Iron Man still doesn't get it.