Get Marwood & I

She is very well regarded Jason, and takes customer service seriously. Let us know how you get on.

Most kind. I've had a nod or two Eric, from the list of the lost. Nothing to write home about mind, but at the end of the day it gets dark. And besides, when all is said and done, who really gives a focaccia?

All companies make mistakes and, at 5M+ books graded, even a tiny error percentage could mean thousands of slabbed mistakes out there - many of which may not ever be discovered until someone cracks the relevant slab. Your submission, alas, is one of those mistakes. A thousand ring free slabs are fabulous. The guy who gets the rings is always gutted. Ditto labelling errors. The only thing that matters is how CGC manage their mistake. I would get in touch with Brittany (bmcmanus@cgccomics.com) and see what she can do to make things right. Good luck

Don't worry, I was on the cusp of calling it a variant too!

Cheers. It gets quite compelling after a while Bob, looking out for all the differences. As you say, sitting under our noses for years and none of us have ever really studied them it seems. I quite like putting the image grids together as they tell their own story. I often find that just as I think a research strand has reached it's conclusion, it takes me in another direction. I honestly thought this thread would dry up after my first five or so posts. All good fun.

Of course! Some interesting points you raise there Eric. I'll expand on the theme a little in my reply if I may. We're not too different in many respects. You can go into your Canadian shop and pick up CPVs, I can go into one of my UK shops and pick up UKPVs. For Marvel - let's face it, pretty much the only publisher anyone cares about lately - the majority of UKPVs are available if you look. Only the older ones can be hard to find, especially for less well known titles, for obvious reasons. The older UKPVs fit into one of two brackets in my experience. There are the key mainstream titles, issues and characters like Amazing Spidey, AF15 etc which get people interested in cents and pence, and I'm seeing some very healthy pence sales lately for them. Then there are the lesser collected titles. I can provide anecdotal evidence that a title like My Girl Pearl is non-existent in pence and that the surviving copies may number less than five. No one gives a monkeys. The scarcity does not catapult the book to high worth status because no one cares about it. People only know it exists because of people like me who value them from a historians perspective. Pretty much everything important about the comic characters we love, and those that have since been immortalised on screen, happened in the 60's and the pence copies of the key books of that age do get a lot of interest now albeit they still stop short of realising US copy prices. That said, in the main, Americans don't like pence copies and never have. Ditto most UK collectors, who value the purity of cents copies over their own priced books. It's true that there are still US collectors who think UKPVs are reprints but they are in the minority now I think. Indeed, there is nothing left to know about pence copies now, if you are prepared to search and read. If you read my threads here on the CGC boards you'll see that I have exhausted every nuance, every feature, every scenario that relates to them. Prices, stamps, distribution, indicias, what exists etc etc. There is nothing left to know. I've researched everything. I even got CGC to label the damn things correctly, not that anyone here cared. I have always stated that I have posted here out of a love for the medium, a longing for the past and a love of research. I don't really care myself whether pence copies are valued or despised by the majority. I just care enough to want to get as much information documented about them before time moves on, they disintegrate and literally no one cares. If you feel Canadians are on the rise comparatively, that is great. And it makes sense too, as - as has been pointed out many times - they share a common currency with their US cousins. For every collector who seeks them for what they are there is another who doesn't even realise it's not a US copy. I've always thought that the person who is really passionate about comics will want to explore new avenues once their run is complete. Canadian copies are a great next step to keep the flame burning. And some do extend also to pence copies (only the really mad ones go as far as Australians though). But they are in the minority in my experience and do not post on this forum in any great numbers. So in summary, more people probably care about Canadians than pence for the reasons stated by others and here in my post. I don't see that changing as I personally believe the hobby is in it's death throes, certainly in the UK. Here, comic shops are next to non existent. Comic shops with back issues scarcer still. With one notable exception, the online dealers never seem to post any new stock. It's eBay and fairs. And eBay is full of sellers who can't take pictures, grade or package reasonably. The fairs have been in decline for years (will they even return?) Comics seem to be going the way of vinyl records and book shops. When I was a kid, Elvis Presley memorabilia was a thing. Now, those that cherish him are mostly dead and no one cares anymore. There was a golden age of American comics in the UK for 20 or so years from the mid 1960s. It's over. They were great years, but they are in the past. Nothing has a divine right to exist of course and there will come a time when the hobby will die out just as other hobbies have. I doubt that kids will reach adulthood in 30 years time and crave the rubbish that Marvel turns out today, certainly when the books themselves are not even available in newsagents and supermarkets - just those niche shops that few towns have one of. No one will want to collect the eighty six thousand different X-Men titles that have been pumped out in recent years. Comics fit their time and that time is over. The comics of today bear no relation to those simple but charming comics of our past. Scarcity only matters financially if the item that is scarce is cherished by enough people. And, whilst it pains me to say it (I might get more interest in my threads if it wasn't the case), not enough people cherish pence books.

I've been looking at the different T&P stamp types over the last few weeks. We know from my grid below that the first 9d stamps were numbered one to nine: And all the subsequent 'first version'' stamps were numbered thus - here are the first wave 10d versions: And the numbering continued for the second less intrusive version type - here are the 1-9's for the slimmer, smaller second wave 10d stamps: The numbering stopped with decimalisation it seems. The grid below, showing the 20 different T&P stamps that I have found so far, shows that the 1-9 numbers disappeared from the 5p stamp onwards: Odd that there is no 9p T&P stamp. The UK Price Variants went from a printed price of 8p to 9p to 10p, but the stamps went straight from 8p to 10. I wonder why? There are quite a few stamps that have no publisher attached to them which I suspect are T&P's but can't be sure. I'll post some examples later. In the meantime, does anyone know which books were the last to have an identifiable T&P stamp on them? My folder is filling up with examples...

I'm hoping that was deliberate Eric

It's funny what you remember, what sticks with you isn't it - "BRADABABOOM!" A momentary flashback to my youth there

It looks like the circle has been cut out of the OPs copy Shad, revealing the splash page wording behind:

This Charlton often turns up in my online searches: It's awful isn't it.

Newsstand copies of FNH Spider-Man #24 exist with overprinted Oct / Nov cover months: Direct Edition: Newsstand Edition: I used to own a copy and have seen one other online. The newsstand copy is hard to find at the best of times so I'm not sure if every copy was affected. Quite cool if you collect Spidey errors and such.

Only one Life missing (get your jokes in now):

Thanks Those copies bring us up to 78 confirmed price variants now: Here is another 'complete' set while the hunt goes on for the missing books:

Very nice, well done Rusty

Thank you

He seemed to on Treasury Editions - old copy of mine:

I never. Chap called Rich did. The jammy

Stop taking the piss Bob. This is deadly serious stuff

Morning The earliest known cover date for an Archie 15 cent variant is February 1962 and there are six titles in scope for that month: Archie #125 Archie's Girls Betty & Veronica # 74 Archie's Joke Book Magazine #60 Archie's Mad House #17 Archie's Pal Jughead #81 Laugh #131 Of those six, I have confirmation of one - Archie #125 - and an anecdotal comment that Jughead #81 has been seen. In my Charlton Canadian Price Variant research, it was suggested to me that the dates that the books were produced, or went on sale, may have a bearing on what may or may not exist. This was indeed the case and the concept was repeated in other research strands of mine. It can therefore be a mistake sometimes to assume a pricing experiment will follow a strict cover month window. Books are produced throughout a given month at various times and the cut off for such experiments were likely date driven, not month driven. If we look at the 'on sale' dates from Mikes Comic Newsstand we can see the dates that each of our six books went on sale and, in theory, identify their individual production sequence. Here are the screen shots for all six: Putting them in order, we get the following 'on sale' date sequence: 9th November - Archie's Mad House #17 16th November - Archie's Joke Book Magazine #60 30th November - Archie #125 (15cv Confirmed) 30th November - Archie's Girls Betty & Veronica # 74 7th December - Archie's Pal Jughead #81 (15cv alleged to have been seen) 7th December - Laugh #131 Speculating, the instructions to the printers would had to have come at some point - "print me X amount of copies of this book with a 15c price on please until further notice / X date". If the production date of the comics matched the on sale date sequence, then the key to whether a 15cv would be made would depend on at what point the instruction was received. If that instruction came after the equivalent production dates for our 9th and 16th November books, then that may explain why no 15cvs have surfaced for them. In a similar vein, still speculating, then the 30th November and 7th December books should exist, given their ongoing subsequently confirmed variant issues. Maybe!

Their site, their rules.