OtherEric

I find all these discoveries amazing, I just don't have anything to contribute to the discussion.

On 5/2/2023 at 12:25 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

Definitely. The Journals have no visibility. I might have mentioned that once or seventy times. 

Or seven hundred and seventy seven…

On 9/12/2022 at 12:13 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

Get digging and see what you can find out Yorick. Or do I have to do everything around here 

Yes.  Yes, you do. 🤪

On 9/9/2022 at 1:50 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

You, you...you rotter.

To get things back on track, I'm going to have to toss my lucky coin:

Oh, that's 'Coyne', isn't it. 

If you're just going to toss it instead! 

On 9/9/2022 at 1:37 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

I just looked it up, Eric.

Stop wondering 

You remind me, however unintentionally, of the worst cartoon Chuck Jones ever worked on, and I make you suffer as well...

I wonder if the Angel name was inspired by the Angel Puss cartoon Warners had put out in 1944, or if there was a common source they both drew from, or if they just independently came up with a similar name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Puss

On 5/18/2022 at 11:03 AM, Yorick said:

I've some National Bookstore (Philippines) books with similar recycling.  Looking at the cover, one might say, "it's just a price variant".  I have no idea how to differentiate the same titled/numbered books with altered interiors on GCD.

Either as two separate issues of the same series... 2(a) and 2(b)...or as two separate series.  Given the extreme content difference and slight cover differences, I would think 2 separate series would probably be the preferred option officially, even if I personally would prefer the first option.

On 5/11/2022 at 10:36 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

I'll let you two battle that one out - here's the draft table:

As you command.  @Qalyar, choose your weapons.  I shall be dual wielding back issues of Alter Ego in one hand and scans from the Digital Comic Museum in the other!

On 5/11/2022 at 10:07 AM, Qalyar said:

I find it unlikely that someone bought the rights to the Fox romance books, then actually licensed those rights to a dodgy little British company for republication.

Iger liked to claim they owned the material they provided to publishers, and were just licensing it out.  That's how Fox wound up with Phantom Lady... Iger claimed it was their character and licensed it to Fox, and Quality either agreed, didn't notice, or didn't care.

On 5/11/2022 at 9:49 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

@Qalyar @OtherEric

Thinking about it boys, do you think Streamline were doing it illegally?

Thorpe & Porter hid remaindered Marvel and DCs in their 'Double Double' compendium comics and 1967 annuals. Maybe Streamline were crossing their fingers no one would notice ten years or so later - especially with the original content hidden under new covers 

As of right now, I think they're probably legal.  What we're seeing so far is almost entirely Fox reprints, with some stray material from a Star book that may have been reprints itself, or inventory from an unpublished Fox book. There's too much consistency.  I suspect they got a bunch of dirt cheap old inventory stories from the Iger shop.

On 5/11/2022 at 5:58 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

 

One other observation - I speculated in previous entries that the missing splash pages in certain stories may have been due to 'unsavoury' content. I was wondering though whether the page count had anything to do with it? Each issue is 28 pages, and each has three stories with no ads. In most cases, only the first story has the original splash page present. If the two missing splash pages were also present however, there would be two extra pages needed but, of course, the page count must be divisible by four. I'll keep an eye on this - maybe the pages are missing simply to fit the page count number - and the splashes usually summarised the story to come, so would be less conspicuous than, say, a later story page.

All good fun.

The stories in Fox books often had disposable first pages.  They normally started their stories on the inside front cover, presumably to make copies with the front cover stripped off look less appealing.  But they then did a whole bunch of giant collections of random rebound books, so they wanted the stories to actually be readable if the first page was gone.  

Fox put a lot of effort into being extraordinarily cheap even by golden age comic publisher standards.

Anyway, I think the page count is the most likely issue, but I think it's possible in some cases streamline never actually got the splash pages to use in their books, since it seems that mostly they weren't getting or using the original covers.

One thing that has become apparent scanning books for the Digital Comic Museum/ CB+ is how rare some certain books are that aren't normally considered high demand.  The Fox Romance books have a lot of nearly impossible to find issues.  When I scanned a coverless copy of My Love Memoirs from a Fox Giant, it took us years to locate a picture of the front cover at all... and that issue has early Wally Wood art!

I'm plenty interested, I just don't have anything to contribute.  Although i am keeping an eye open for books in the time frame I can check for the secondary indicia.

On 2/1/2022 at 5:04 PM, Beyonder123 said:

Keep in mind I'm not super knowledgeable on this subject, but is it possible that these were distributed in the UK, but specifically in an area that used American Dollars. Like perhaps a military base?

 

Edit: I do acknowledge that Harvey books would be a strange thing to distribute to military personnel, but there are examples of Disney Mark Jewelers Inserts.

It's also quite possible they were distributing the books in other markets we haven't figured out yet, or were considering doing so if the smaller books proved a success.  While I have no idea what the break point would be, I assume at some point it stops being worthwhile printing regional price variants.  At that point defaulting to an US price for an US publisher would seem the reasonable default approach to me.

As is so often the case, this is utterly fascinating even if I have nothing useful to contribute to the discussion.  Thank you.