Get Marwood & I

What a shot! Thirty love to the T&P stamper bloke! (he thought the world of this issue)

.......

And talking of World's Finest (play the song you miserable...):

Here's a fun one, which I snaffled from the bay of e for limited pee (pence I mean): Bit of a bad spine roll there Or is it....?

I put this lovely grid together to show all the different T&P prices Handily, they all fit nicely in the block What? What? Eh? Oh, bollox! OK, I'm over it

Now, Golden Key. Why didn't any of our UK distributors like the keys of Gold? Could it be that they were silver age and they got confused? I don't know. Do you? I have multiple examples of UK Distributor stamped comics for all the main protagonists apart from Gold Key. That is, apart from this one book which, incidentally, I have seen three T&P stamped copies of: So here's a challenge for our readership - find me another Gold Key comic with an identifiable UK distributor stamp. And not these silly 'price only' ones mind... ...proper T&P or LM ones. Get on with it then, I haven't got all ing day That book again, Thriller! Number Two (January 1963 by the way. And a good read)

Time for a quick recap We know when UKPV's first started to appear in the UK by nature of the dirty great printed prices on them. Or dirty small prices, in the case of the Miller Charltons. No arguments there, with March 1960 being our first known cover date example (Archie). The point of this thread was to try to establish whether any cents books came over earlier than that, evidenced by the presence of an official UK distributor stamp. We have examples of books cover / indicia dated 1958, but they seem to be outliers and were likely brought over to the UK in bulk much later than their actual US production dates. The current 1958 outliers are: Attack #54 (Charlton) 1958 – T&P Li'l Genius #17 (Charlton) April 1958 - T&P Hot Rods & Racing Cars #35 (Charlton) June 1958 – T&P Fightin’ Navy #83 (Charlton) September 1958 – T&P Fightin’ Air Force #12 (Charlton) October 1958 – T&P Those handful of books aside, I put this table together to show where distributor stamps start to appear in earnest. Earnest wasn't happy about that by the way, but he was always a cranky one. The books start to appear sequentially from February 1959 and I have seen multiple copies of the early ones to prove that they are not random / one offs. So it looks like the process started 'properly' with books cover dated February 1959. We don't know of course when they actually went on sale in the UK, and have to take account of the shipping time, but it interests me nonetheless to see them summarised. I don't think anyone else has attempted to do this so we once again are trail blazing here. I say 'we'.... Anyway, here's the latest version of my ridiculously pompous chart showing the books I've captured so far (with help from the thread contributors), up to October 1959: It goes all the way to December but I can't fit it into one shot. Yes, I know. Anyway, I've been mucking about in this area for a while and have some more ground breaking stuff to report. I say 'ground breaking'.... If you're reading this post having visited the thread for the first time, go back and read the lot. It's proper interesting once you get past the crappy medals bit.

Very nice Melanie Here's a cool one - not only a Five Pee Dee Cee UK Pee Vee (I like that rhyme) but a printing error too! A distinct lack of black ink to the top right side of the cover, much more noticeable in hand. It seems to start with the shadow under Supergirl's arm and is conspicuously absent from the seated girl's hair, window frame and the colouring around the masthead / issue details. The only one I've seen like it so far. We like

Here's one! A Wilkins variant I'm up to 1,298 confirmed APVs now - up 6 since the last report. I'll update the Pence Palace of Doom later. I haven't included this one in the figures yet - what seems to be the first AUS priced trade paperback that I've seen: Not sure what to do with it yet - it may be a reprint....

I like that one

Now, Marvel Super Heroes stood at two UKPVs (numbers 72 & 80) for sixty thousand years until I happened across the aforeposted lone number 104 at a fair last year. That lead me to research the title all over again to see if I could have missed any others and, of course, none surfaced. Until the other month that is, when #103 inexplicably appeared not once, but twice in quick succession (I bought them both): Flippin' Nora! Now, again, the casual reader must be thinking how rubbish my research methods must be if a book like this can evade capture for so long with me being Mister Pence Stuff and everything like that. And I won’t bore you with my ‘how long and hard I looked for it for ten years’ defence again. But my God in Heaven, how scarce must some of these damn things be? It begs the question, again, whether others are missing and, of course, I’ve reassessed all the 20p books again and again in recent months. I always look for the patterns though remember, and this one may tell a story – both MSH and MTU both have the two final issues sitting there in 20p covers: A kind of symmetry that may or may not be telling. And for those not wondering, I’ve done the ‘adding all the 20p books each month up’ thing and can find no pattern which might indicate a consistent UKPV production limit per calendar month as indeed there has been in other periods of Marvel UKPV history: This may mean there are some missing still. Or that there aren’t because there was no specific UKPV limit by cover month. Or that any limit was set by something other than the cover month (e.g. 'on sale date') if it even existed. Or something else. My gut tells me that that’s the last one that will surface now though, MSH #103. Probably. Oh, what do I know. Anyway, 3,022 UKPVs!

Come on then A while back I put out an all-points bulletin on the 20p version of Marvel Super Heroes #104 for which only one copy has surfaced in all my years of researching UKPVs. Details on page 64. No one has come forward since with sight or confirmation of a second copy and I haven’t found another one myself despite extensive trawling. What I have found though – bizarrely - is an eBay listing for the original printing plate of the 20p copy. Here are the pictures from the listing: How cool is that. I do love a production related thing. The eBay listing description is quite interesting and acts as yet another anecdotal scrap of evidence that the UKPVs were printed in the US of A: https://www.ebay.com/itm/1981-MARVEL-SUPER-HEROES-THE-INCREDIBLE-HULK-104-COMIC-BOOK-COVER-PRINTING-PLATE/124304813148?hash=item1cf124ec5c:g:0cgAAOSwyFBfPUAM Rotten to think of all those melted down plates isn’t it It’s far too expensive a thing for me to consider buying of course but I do find it amazing that I can only find one copy of the book that it printed over here in the UK. That’s not to say that there aren’t any others of course – but the absence is telling and perhaps indicates a low print run being the final UKPV month. Plus it would likely be a low print run book anyway, being a reprint title. I've said that before, probably. Anyway, the things you find when trawling the interweb, eh....

Coherent? Me? Never!

This is very sad news to hear this morning, the passing of an established and clearly much liked board member. I never met Bob but we had a very nice PM exchange last year and he seemed wise and decent to me. RIP Bob, up there in comic heaven.

Weird. The colorist is missing too Reggie.

I suppose for every owner that wants to show their pages off, there's another keeping quiet. One lucky sod could have an entire issue. And given how freely pages were handled by Marvel back in the day, many have likely long since bitten the dust.

I wonder how many are sitting in private collections, and how many are lost forever.

Missed it! I knew 153 straight away - those poses are etched on my memory and I've read that issue a hundred times. Only the window tap panel rang a bell on the 126 though.

What wally told you to do that?! Only joking Timeless. Welcome. Nice books you have there. I've found another new one. Will post it next week along with some other pence ramblings