Get Marwood & I

Kid Colt Outlaw #96, January 1961 - pence copy (not a single copy on eBay currently, pence or cents)

That's a beauty - it's very hard to find the dark covers in grade

I can match that now, albeit with a pencer I take it you got the 'on sale' date from Mike's Comic Newsstand - in my research I've found many of those Library of Congress dates to be some months out. Typically, a book would hit the newsstand 3 months prior to the cover date. The end of Feb is five months out for a July book - look around for actual arrival date copies and you find.... Early April is in line with the 3 month window.

Welcome to the club Frisco! You are a model member here in my view - you post pictures of comics that you love. If three or four people like it, trust me, that's success....

I bet there's someone out there who has them all. In my experience, certain collectors like to remain private and don't like to show off their books - they may be reading this right now with a wry smile on their face... I've always liked to collect the stuff that others don't in my life. Even as a Spidey collector, I was the only one in a group of 20 or so rabid completists who had the US, Canadian, Pence and Australian copies. I didn't have the best ASM collection, but I think I may have had the most complete as far as first printings were concerned. Even now, while Marvel leads the way by a country mile in the popularity stakes, I collect only the pence copies for Archie, King, Charlton and Gold Key. And I pick up Dells when the copy is right. DC have never really floated my boat. I would collect the pence copies - there are only 800 or so - and I don't think it would be that difficult, comparatively, given the date ranges. No big keys or anything to worry about. But they don't resonate with me for some reason. Never have. Marvel is virtually unobtainable now, I think. Too many expensive books, and too many scarce non-super hero books to stand a chance of success. Possible of course, to start from scratch and get the whole 3,023, but it would be massively expensive and you would need the patience of a saint as well as the time to relentlessly seek out those obscure early titles. You have to spend thousands of hours searching for an image like this to come along in an online lot, which it does sometimes only once in a lifetime: For me, the top 20 is a good way of acknowledging my love of Marvel pence copies though, and will have to do. And the Miller variants are satisfying in their own right, being a mixture of pence and cents priced books. I stopped posting about Charlton a long time back, but my pence collection there is almost certainly the most complete in the world. It gives me the greatest pleasure that I've ever felt in my comic collecting life, which has had many phases. One of my current projects is working through each and labelling them individually with customised stickers. That will keep me going for a while. We all wish we could go back, don't we, armed with our current knowledge, to seek out that which is largely unobtainable or unavailable today. Not necessarily to make money, nice though that might be (a run of Gold Keys or a gaggle of IH #181's...), but to build quality runs of what we now love. I'm currently researching something completely different, that I have never posted about here. The annoying thing is that I owned and sold some of the books that I am now actively seeking, but at the time I did not appreciate their variant status. I wish now that I'd adopted @Kevin.J's lifetime strategy - never sell!

Nice idea for a thread Frisco, and a good reason to show off those books I'm always slightly unnerved by the copies that have a white top left triangle when zooming through searches - against a coloured cover background, they always look at first glance like they've been clipped On a similar theme, I always liked this 'pre-Marvel' Marvel corner logo from 1947 (not my copy, alas):

Oh, blimey, I'd do it Gary, if I had the space. And the money. A TARDIS maybe...

Thanks boys. There was a lot of help and support along the way, from good people like yourselves. They do look good, don't they, that first twenty all lined up. Wonderful things aren't they, comics from that era. They're of their time, and, like many things for me, they'll never come again, never be matched or bettered.

Cheers Panto 3,023 it is, for Marvel: The Pence Palace of Doom And as is often the case, the rarest are the least desired. That Battle #70 is the only 9d example I have ever seen but remains a book of low interest to most. I posted the story of how I came to get it at a live auction a while back. A very enjoyable day it was, so the book holds special meaning for me, aside of its apparent uniqueness. You wouldn't believe what I had to bid to win it, tucked away as it was in a lot of other books which I gave to Paul McCartney in a swap for the Patsy & Hedy and a dollop of future credit. Usually when I point out 9d scarcity a flurry of additional copies surface (see Wyatt Earp #29) but Battle is the one 9d book that has continued to buck that trend. Even MGP #7 has shown up three times now. Anyway, my work on Marvel is done - all issues confirmed, all content confirmed, all differences confirmed etc etc etc - and I am no longer seeking any copies for my collection. I plan to replace my journal pages at some point - the original intention was for them to act as the reference summaries of issue numbers etc, but I look at them now and they seem quite drab, as well as being a little out of date in places. What I have in mind will be much more image friendly and, hopefully, engaging as a result. So if you see the journal disappear at some point, you'll know what I'm up to. Thanks for reading, and for the kind words.

He arrived ....so I could finish this: I wonder if I'm the only person on Earth who can post this: The next step is to triple board / double Mylite2 them all, with customised Top 20 stickers. And then try to take a decent photo! I'm always rubbish at them. Thanks again to @Garystar for graciously swapping Patsy for a charitable donation a few years back. Only took me five years to get there....

Yes - certain panels still show the old pose magic, but overall it looks to me like Mike especially was half asleep. Shhh, you'll wake @Winterboy's daughter up

Yep, as we all will be ourselves one day.... Just thought I'd brighten the proceedings there

Looks like I still had it in 2012 - found it in this insurance video. I can't remember selling it!

...here it is on CAF, presumably posted by the new owner:

According to my old records, I paid the princely sum of £53.70 for the original art of page 28 many moons ago: Oddly, I can't find a picture of it and I can't find a record of when I sold it. I bought it because it was Andru, and because for some reason it was on eBay, and rather cheap I thought, even that long ago. I always thought the work very hurried and slap dash though - certainly the worst Esposito inking I had seen - and the page never really resonated with me, hence the sale. I wish I had kept it now of course. I recall the line work on Peter in this image was particularly poor: I'll keep looking, to see if I can find it.

Double fair

And I did all that whilst partying, drinking and successfully chasing hot chicks! OK, I lied about the partying. And the hot chicks. And the drinking was mostly tea. Bugger....

Evening all Another 'Fun Catalog' comparison, because you demanded it* UK PeeVee: US Copee: Insides you see: How cool is thee! So, no Fun Catalog in the UK copy and an alternative masthead accordingly. And the different price of course. As I write, I have still yet to see any definitive proof as to who was the UK distributor for the Gold Key pence copies. I worked out Archie by process of elimination the other week and for Gold Key, there only appears to be two likely candidates - Thorpe & Porter and World Distributors Limited. Certainly if this unfinished illustration is anything to go by: Who else could it be, other than one of those two? Only Marvel had UKPVs on the go at the same time as the Gold Key UKPVs were in evidence - T&P were only distributing stamped DC cents books. And Marvel at the time was distributed by World Distributors. So could it have been them? Our 7p Gold Key Road Runner above is cover dated December 1974 (412). At that time, Marvel UKPVs were priced 8p - see the extract of Daredevil below: If we pop back and compare a Marvel 7p font to our Gold Key 7p one, we see no match: If World were the distributors for both Marvel and Gold Key, would we expect to see a similar font and / or pricing pattern? Or is that not relevant? If it is, does that put T&P in the driving seat? If so, why do we not see one single T&P stamped Gold Key book? Well, apart from this solitary example of mine: It's a mystery, isn't it. I've seen it written down online that T&P distributed Gold Key, but never backed with any evidence. I've seen many things stated online about UKPVs that are incorrect (e.g. the total absence of recognition for Miller) so I don't trust those sources. I want something definitive. The jury therefore, for now, remains out. *Note, the 'you' referred to here is not an actual living person, meaning that, in fact, no one demanded it. Sorry.

....talking of the seven, I've been working this up recently with input from @Malacoda who knows more about the actual distributors than anyone I know: More on that soon...

Just a tad Amazing when you think of it. Until I came along, not one person on Earth had ever established how many publishers produced UKPVs, let alone fully document their issue ranges. Tis a niche market for sure.... Archie UK Price Variants - 24 confirmed issues Charlton UK Price Variants - 567 confirmed issues DC UK Price Variants - 840 confirmed issues Dell UK Price Variants - 219 confirmed issues Gold Key UK Price Variants - 122 confirmed issues King UK Price Variants - 22 confirmed issues Marvel UK Price Variants - 3,023 confirmed issues

There's some nice people in the business, for sure.

Don't be disheartened Tghutcn. The forum is US run, so it stands to reason that interest in UKPV related discussions will be limited. Even the established UK boardie's here have next to no interest in them. Revel in being the outsider mate...

Mistakes happen, and I'd hope that they would correct those on their dollar. It's the incorrect labeling by design that gets my goat.

Basic, but pretty