Get Marwood & I

That's interesting, to see actual evidence of shipping times - thanks. When you say... "In 1961, Marvels on sale were cover dated roughly in sequence with the calendar, but DCs were 3 months behind calendar date" ...are you saying that was your personal experience?

Good, process indicative point Albert Not on the ones I've gathered, nay Are you saying we got served left overs Albert

Brilliant, that fits it doesn't it Gary - the books were either a cover to calendar month date match or a month or two behind, as indeed they would be with a 1-3 month freight shipping window and assuming that they were returns that had been on sale for a month in the US (the DCs I mean - jury's out on whether the Marvel UKPV gap fillers were the same). The 'firm sale' recollection won't please Albert, but seems more logical to me. But that may be regional as we've said. So, imagine books arriving in the UK one or two months behind cover date, and then try to imagine when the shipment with 3 consecutive issues would have arrived...... .....if that is what happened.

Cheers Gary. I plotted Strange Tales this morning (despite the eye strain) as it has the same UKPV issue gap as Amazing Spidey: Again, I couldn't find any stamped books where 9d / 10d UKPVs existed, just for the ten gap issues of #126 to #135: Here's how they plot (I don't have a pictorial example but have added Kevin's 9d stamped #126): Stamp 6 and 8 above both have two consecutive ASM and ST issues And look at stamp four above there on cycle 9 - three consecutive issues of ASM, three for Strange Tales. If we are saying that each stamp represents a shipping delivery, and those deliveries were broadly monthly, then it begs the question how did T&P and the newsagents manage this? Did they put three consecutive Marvels on the shelf? I know that chronological cover date order was not necessarily at the forefront of anyone's mind at the time, but this still seems odd to me and throws doubt on whether the stamp numbers really were linked to shipping events. Maybe those Marvels that I have plotted there belong on a later cycle - who can be sure? But then again the cover date alignment is broadly in line with some of the DCs (I need to plot more titles) and, overall, align to the number of elapsed months. If some collectors can say, for example, that was the norm for the time - three issues at once then nothing for months - then it all holds together. But it does show that the broadly monthly process of the early cycles has been somewhat corrupted at this point. The elephant in the room - the historic reference to shipping strikes. Maybe they are something to do with the bunching? I'll add a few more titles, I think and try to build up the picture. One point I forgot to mention about this whole cycle 7-10 update - the amount of stamps that are unreadable. They are very prevalent in this phase and I think there is a stamp type that was deliberately / unnumbered by design - I'll post some examples later.

Guys, a question for you all How long do you think the shipping time from the US to the UK was? I've seen mention of 3 months in the past. A current shipping website cites 42 days for freight. This stamped copy of Action 315 has a cover date of August 1964 and an 'on sale' / copyright date of 25th June 1964, backed up by the arrival stamp give or take a few days: If it was on sale in the US from the 22nd of June, it would likely have been there for a month at least before being taken down as unsold. So let's say 22nd July. If it took around two months for it to be sent back to source, packed up, shipped to the UK and then stamped and distributed to UK shops it would be on sale over here around the 22nd of September, one month later than it's cover date. For those around at the time, what do you recall as to cover months vs live calendar months? Were they a month in arrears as a matter of course? A one month shipping window would place them on sale here in line with their cover month, a three month shipping window two months in 'arrears'. What do you think? Is it possible that the copies sent to us weren't the unsold US copies, but the overprinted copies and they were sent to us directly from the printers? Just a thought.

I see your point, they both physically vary to the US original, but one is a first printing product from the original printing run / state and the other is a reprint made in a different country. I think that distinction is key and deserves to be recognised in the naming conventions otherwise the first printing book is immediately devalued. I doubt that the Filipino books even used the original plates myself - more likely mock ups created from photocopies given the production quality. I agree, it's unlikely we'll ever make everyone happy but I remain of the opinion that every 'foreign' publication can be categorised without reference to the terms 'variant' or 'edition' or in relation to a US book that it may reprint. Just call them exactly what they are - their title, issue number and who published them, along with a rider that the book reprints material from an original US source. Yes, that's why it interests me - trying to eliminate all those lingering false perceptions that first printing books from the original US production run with UK, Canadian and Australian are not reprints and should not be lumped in with local foreign reprints. CGC have agreed to call the UK, Canadian and Australian copies 'Price Variants' finally, where they used to call them 'editions'. That's a great step forward, if you agree with the 'price variant' descriptor (which many still don't). But CGC still call foreign reprints 'editions' and don't, in my opinion, make it clear enough that they are their own thing, not a reprinted copy of the US book that they resemble whether in full or in part. I'm glad you joined in - CGC are still a small part of the hobby overall but their influence seems to grow by the year to the point that many see them as the be all and end all of classification and grading. I think they should reconsider their current labelling approach for all non-US publications which reprint US material before any inaccuracies and false terminology are bedded in. The categorisation and associated wording on their labels / census should never be misleading - it should be the very opposite of that, otherwise CGC run the risk of being responsible for cementing false perceptions in less knowledgeable new collectors minds and normalising questionable terminology.

@Harry Lime Come back Harry. I need something to make a fart joke out of

The colouring on that puts me in mind of the old Bazooka Joe bubble gum comics.

I've only populated four DC titles so far - no doubt some of the others would fill it up. I may have to gird myself for further additions....

Not a run you probably see every day

Maybe one of them couldn't spell Reggie Did you do this one from 180? I can't recall it:

Which makes complete sense if these books were market testers. By the way, I contacted Marvel five times over successive months to see if I could get someone to look at this - every contact was ignored alas. I just tried again: https://www.marvel.com/help/contact The days of the Merry Marvel Marching Malarkey are well and truly over it seems.....

Afternoon boys Right, let's see if I can make this clear. First up, I say upfront that I haven't added enough titles yet for this exercise to stand up to full scrutiny but I think there is enough here to make the points I'm aiming to make. It is absolutely painstaking gathering multiple images of sequential books and filing them in a way that supports adding them to this table. I usually have fairly good patience for this kind of thing but this particular exercise is just mind-numbing. Hopefully the 'results' wont be! So, we know about the first four T&P cycles as per our previous exercise which proved as far as possible the sequential nature of the stamp numbering - here's the current summary sheet which also records the earliest known stamped DC examples by title for those that existed at the time: What I have subsequently done is taken a handful of titles and continued plotting examples of those all the way up to the tenth 1-9 cycle. The first thing I wanted to do was to see if there remained a broad correlation between the number of stamps and the number of calendar months (i.e. was each stamp - if we agree this is what happened - about a month apart and representative of a monthly shipping cycle). The results are quite good here - from the sample, there were 73 stamping events in between 69 calendar months: That is broadly consistent enough to suggest that stamping was more or less a monthly occurrence, logically so given the largely monthly nature of the periodicals being stamped Here are the first, eight and ninth cycles: The first is fully populated via our previous exercise, the eight and ninth populated only with: Action Comics Batman The Flash Wonder Woman Amazing Spider-Man (only the stamped issues which exist in the first UKPV hiatus window) Aside of the stamp to calendar month alignment, the next two things I wanted to establish were: Does a Marvel title follow the same pattern as DC in respect of stamps and cover dates? Do the DC issues still more or less appear in a monthly sequence Here are some early observations: We can see the specific stamp where the stamps change from 9d to 10d as being the '5' stamp of the eight cycle The eight Spidey issue cover dates only have a loose alignment with those of the four DC titles which share the same stamps 'Bunching' is prevalent with many stamp events having up to 3 consecutive issues within them - stamp 4 of cycle 8 is a great example, 3 Batmans and 3 Actions As well as bunching, the same issue often repeats in successive stamp events The new 10d stamps replace the old 10d versions around stamp 5 of the 9th cycle - I found examples of the same issue for the same title having both old and new examples which is odd if you think about it and gives an insight into how / where the books might have been stamped If we assume that each stamping event represents one calendar month, and take the stamp 4 of the eight cycle, are we really saying that comic shops would have received Batman 164, 165 and 166 all at the same time and then nothing for two months? Hmmmm I'll let the sediment settle for a while I think

OK, I'm back at my PC Jean. I like that phrase of yours there "...represents an equivalent context to the original" - that is quite persuasive. My issue with the word 'edition', still, is that I feel it implies that the book in question is a version of the original production book. Maybe I'm wrong to think that. I see 'edition' being used where the book varies to the original but is on a par, for want of a better word, with it. So 'edition' would include things like, where applicable: Direct Edition Newsstand Edition Holofoil Edition Deluxe Edition Retailer Incentive Edition Things like that. They are all 'editions' of the same book so to speak. To add a foreign reprint alongside those just doesn't seem right to me and corrupts the distinction. I see four broad camps of potential categories for US produced comics under which I think it is possible to place all publications which include US comic creations, wherever they are printed: The original US books Variations of the original US books intended for the home market intended for a specific purpose Variations of the original US books intended for a foreign market Foreign publications Every book with US comic content should fit into one of those categories. I would then subdivide as follows, within each category: The original books: First printings Second / subsequent printings Different edition types (holofoil, deluxe, newsstand, direct etc) Variations of the original books intended for the home market intended for a specific purpose: US price variants (30/35) US Newsstand Price Variants (1999/2000 $2.29 & $2.49) Variations of the original books intended for a foreign market: UK Price Variants Canadian Price Variants Australian Price Variants Foreign publications: Reprints that carry the same title / content as the original US book (e.g. our Philippines ASM) Reprints under a different title that include original US content (e.g. Spider-Man Comics Weekly / your 'Los 4 Fantastic') If CGC were to devise such a table, they could create uniformity of labelling and remove all these examples we see of different labelling approaches. So for me, the label would include the following wording as standard under each of the four suggested categories (just examples shown for now, it could be built up to a master template): The original US books: "Second Printing" / "Newsstand Edition" / "Deluxe Edition" etc Variations of the original US books intended for the home market: "30 Cent Variant" / "$2.49 US Newsstand Price Variant" Variations of the original US books intended for a foreign market: "UK Price Variant" / "Canadian Price Variant" / "Australian Price Variant" Foreign publications: "Amazing Spider-Man #CO8-75" coupled with "Distributed in the Philippines by 'Goodwill Bookstore Trading Inc'. Reprints Amazing Spider-Man #111" "Spider-Man Comics Weekly #131" coupled with "Reprints Amazing Spider-Man #97" So in respect of the fourth category for all foreign publications the CGC label will call the book by it's local title and state the local issue number and it will always state 'reprint' and what is reprinted. The word 'edition' doesn't have to feature at all. The reason I think that works is because it is factual - you are calling the book exactly what it is. "Los Fantastic 4 #1" is exactly that and you do not need to say it is an edition of anything as it is its own solitary thing. If there was a holofoil "Los Fantastic 4 #1" then that would be labelled "Holofoil" edition, but it is not an 'edition' of the original US book. This is just a talking point - I see scope to merge the first two categories already leaving: original US books (and all their 'home' variations) original US books for foreign distribution everything else!

Agreed. There has to be a cut of point, from 9d stamp to 10d - the work I'm doing currently will hopefully help flesh it out

....this one finally came up in my pre-set searches: Only 3 Barkers left if my 'no AUS' April 1994 scenario plays out as expected for these four titles :

It does, and the discussion is what interests me, hearing different viewpoints. I'll respond to your detailed points later as I'm on my tablet and need pictures. I think there are many grey areas and it's really difficult to arrive at absolutes which can't be picked at in some way. But I sense that CGC have not thought through their labelling strategy fully enough when it comes to categorising different comics which print or reprint the same content. Certainly in respect of foreign publications where their labelling examples suggest an absence of uniformity. As the submissions for foreign books is growing, it would make sense for CGC to use the expertise at its disposal - the members here - to help drive out a labelling approach with terminology that the majority at least support. You'd think that a company who to a degree stand or fall on their reputation for accuracy would have a strong interest in getting it right as early as possible into their existence. To be fair, maybe they think they have. No reply to my 'ask CGC' question as yet but it is a holiday period. More witterings later Maud!

Regional availability was a thing with the 30/35 variants - maybe that's a feature with these too.

Nice to see an example of that one where the price is visible Ganni https://www.comics.org/issue/1972538/cover/4/ I remember many years back debating with the Spidey completists whether the image on the GCD (link above) - or one like it - was a printing error, perhaps a 30 cent variant related. Those were the days.

Quick update, the broadly sequential monthly DC pattern that we see in the first four T&P 1-9 cycles goes right out the window by the 8th and 9th cycle. I just want to add another title or two, to beef it up, then I'll post those two cycles along with the Amazing Spider-Man UKPV issue gaps, hopefully tomorrow. Quite illuminating, it is....

So you're that guy that's been bending all the spines... The Thor 19 regular is a good example - none of us could find a copy for the longest time and then a few came along together. That often happens, the old bus routine. Keep looking Paq, keep looking...

Good to hear / half see. I've been plotting Action Comics across 10 cycles for the last few hours. It don't half take a while.... ...and it gets tricky to plot when you have old style fives.... ....old style unreadables... ...new style ones... ...and new style fives: Apart from that it's great fun

This is what the CGC label should say for this example in my opinion: Amazing Spider-Man #C08-75 JMC Press Inc, Undated "Distributed in the Philippines by 'Goodwill Bookstore Trading Inc'. Reprints Amazing Spider-Man #111"