Redshade

On 4/23/2024 at 12:09 AM, Albert Tatlock said:

Was it Eddie Charlton v Cliff Thorburn?

If so, don't bother waking up.

Tha's tekking mi back a bit theer Albert o'd lad.

On 4/22/2024 at 8:58 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

 Some seller has loads of the Conquistadors, and can't sell them for a tenner anymore. 

And a few hundred Skunky if you recall a previous conversation.

On 4/22/2024 at 8:52 PM, Malacoda said:

Ouch.  I hate losing by a quid. I'd rather pay more than I wanted and then forget I overpaid than get pipped at the post and never forget it.  Condolences.

Yes, a bit frustrating in retrospect (I have 20/20 vision in retrospection) I left a pre-bid of £32 and the other chap must've left a higher amount (duh!) and the system just went up to the next highest bid for him.

On 4/22/2024 at 8:49 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

Love the price sticker. 

Yes, I thought that you would Steve that's part of the reason I had a stab. I left a bid of £32 when it was at £10.50 yesterday and I was 75% certain that I would win it. I wonder who it was?

I'm not sure how to find old posts in this system so apologies in advance if this missive is in an incorrect place. 
There has been discussions in the pages about the Canadian Century comics (Skunky, Dr Mercy and others which I have) and when I saw this on eBay UK I had to have a pop.
Alas my bid of £32 was not high enough. Was it one of you bounders?

On 4/4/2024 at 9:03 AM, themagicrobot said:

If these stamps do belong to Goldstar then his girl never developed the techniques employed by T&Ps Gladys and Ethel.

I don't think Mr Gold's two employees Candy and Crystal quite had the experience of Gladys and Ethel although some say they were a right pair of old stampers

On 4/3/2024 at 9:23 PM, Kevin.J said:

 

Ian Penmans sister knew nothing about comics, imagine she rang Silver Acre first, Darryl would have made what seemed like a sweet offer to her I am sure 

 

On 4/2/2024 at 7:35 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

Spotted this whilst waiting around in hospital browsing...

Vintage Marvel comic collection sells for £13k

Yes, I saw that Steve.
There are a lot of "regular" non comic Antiques Auctioneers out there now becoming comic savvy and this is the route I would go down with a large collection to sell. Even if they charge commission for doing so you would still be better off than succumbing to a dealer's "great offer" of whatever lowball amount they proffer these days. And don't even think about doing it oneself on eBay or whatever.

On 4/2/2024 at 4:30 AM, Malacoda said:

Do you remember Marvels being in short/non-existent supply?  Do you also remember the DC's being haphazard, or did you pop down every four weeks or so and find the next issue waiting each month? 

It's too far in the past now for me to remember specifics but I would say that DC (and Gold Key and various funny animal titles) were far more prevalent in my neck of the woods than were Marvel. Perhaps the Marvel comics were snapped up first by the early birds. They were part of my childhood reading though so perhaps scarcity is a false memory and Marvels were better sourced in the second-hand market. Although I do recall that earlier on in my childhood I found Marvel comics boring because it was "all just fighting every time", and no matter how cheesy DC comics were from an adult perspective I liked them because they had a proper story with a beginning, a middle and an ending all contained within the same comic.
I remember that I got some decent runs put together although there was always the occasional missing issue for whatever reason. 

On 3/31/2024 at 5:34 PM, Malacoda said:

These are, of course, the T&P staples, so it kind of feels like your spinner was getting re-stocked by the T&P rep himself rather than the newsagent.  

  

I've told this story before in other sites but here goes. In the 60s (I was born in 1955) along with the daily paper and my mother's various magazines I had my Beano and Dandy (and later Victor and Hotspur) delivered by the paper boy. I had to walk to the newsagents to purchase American comics. I remember asking the newsagent (Mr Hartley was a patient man) why I couldn't order and have delivered my favourite Superman and Batman comics. He told me that he himself couldn't order specific US comics and that he had to take whatever they sent him. This was in the old West Riding.
There were other outlets where one could get hold of mainly second hand comics such as Market stalls, Church Fetes and School Bring and Buy Sales.
And of course we used to swap comics in the school playground. Primary school that was, one learned not to mention soppy comics when one started at secondary school.

On 2/16/2024 at 1:49 AM, Bart Allen said:

Just two of my Whitworth facsimiles' if that'll help ~ I originally believed my YM #370 was a facsimile, though proved to be an original via Ewan and 30thCC due to the staple rust:

P.S. Where, Redshade, where did you see that Whitworth catalogue?

I bought the catalogue from a dealer (sorry, can't remember whom) some years ago. Rather appositely it is a xeroxed copy complete with occasional tick marks at the side of some of the titles.

On 2/7/2024 at 9:59 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

Here are a couple of pictures of the old and the new wings of the Showroom.

Probably.

 

"That one on the top level there please".

On 2/6/2024 at 11:44 PM, Albert Tatlock said:

From an old copy of ICJ.

Bryon is circulating his readership in an attempt to gather material to reproduce, it seems.

£4 to borrow each item of interest, I am not sure how many he would need to sell to break even.

More of a hobby than a business, I reckon.

 

I have never seen this periodical before Albert. The only name that I recognise apart from Denis Gifford is Steve Holland, although it gives an idea of where B Whitworth was coming from (and I don't mean Lancashire). I wonder what The Showroom was?

On 2/6/2024 at 8:51 AM, themagicrobot said:

So what is Mr Whitworth's story? Did he just copy/reproduce issues as and when he received orders? Or did he actually make copies of everything in that booklet? In the 1980s demand for 99% of that stuff was non-existent. With inventory and no sales he would soon go bust. There was no Interweb to facilitate sales. But if too many fakes are still around now won't they fool the CGC graders?? And where did he stand legally, especially copying Superadventure/Superboy/Superman comics.

I think I will start a business copying Gold Token comics. As I will have gullible investors despite zero sales I will still become rich like Max Bialystock in The Producers.

 

". . .  and no sales he would soon go bust.".

I think that the enterprise was more of a side-line than a steady flow of income.

"And where did he stand legally, especially copying Superadventure/Superboy/Superman comics".

Notice that he always copied reprint comics  rather than directly from DC issues. Even so I would imagine that he wouldn't have had a leg to stand on from a legal point of view.

On 2/6/2024 at 8:51 AM, themagicrobot said:

So what is Mr Whitworth's story? Did he just copy/reproduce issues as and when he received orders? Or did he actually make copies of everything in that booklet? In the 1980s demand for 99% of that stuff was non-existent. With inventory and no sales he would soon go bust. There was no Interweb to facilitate sales. But if too many fakes are still around now won't they fool the CGC graders?? And where did he stand legally, especially copying Superadventure/Superboy/Superman comics.

I think I will start a business copying Gold Token comics. As I will have gullible investors despite zero sales I will still become rich like Max Bialystock in The Producers.

 

I don't know a lot about Whitworth. I know (from various "blogs" back in the day) he used to produce fanzines and latterly some of the "Complete Guide to . . ."  type self- published books and was friends with (and borrowed the comics from) the big collectors/dealers of the day. Apparently not all comics in the lists were produced and those that were never had more than a half a dozen copied printed. It was not as if the market was flooded with these things. Other than that, I don't have any more information.

On 2/5/2024 at 9:08 PM, themagicrobot said:

1962 so 62 years young. I think they are original and genuine. I will know for sure when mine arrives 😊 

I thought the only 1980s facsimiles were Marvelman family stuff?

I found these photos of some (all?) of Whitworth's catalogue pages on an old phone.
 

On 2/5/2024 at 9:08 PM, themagicrobot said:

1962 so 62 years young. I think they are original and genuine. I will know for sure when mine arrives 😊 

I thought the only 1980s facsimiles were Marvelman family stuff?

Unnaturally white pages and better paper quality is easily discernible, especially when held side by side with an original.

On 2/5/2024 at 9:08 PM, themagicrobot said:

 

I thought the only 1980s facsimiles were Marvelman family stuff?

No, the Whitworth *ahem* facsimiles comprised of dozens of 50s titles. I have one of their old catalogues somewhere, I'll dig it out sometime (it's too late now).

On 2/5/2024 at 7:16 PM, themagicrobot said:

There are currently still two available on the Bay

over

 

Those pages look to be very white for a seventy (?) year old book. Rather too white imho. Could they be some of the "facsimiles" of 1950s comics that were produced in the !980s?
(Being over forty years old if kept in the wrong conditions could cause the rusty staples).

On 1/15/2024 at 6:27 AM, nmtg9 said:

Going to school in Middlesbrough and Leeds I didn't meet another kid who read or collected comics until I was 16. Or at least the didn't publicly acknowledge it...

I can remember joyfully swapping comics at Junior school (very near Leeds co-incidentally) but it was something one kept quiet about later on at Grammar school.

On 1/4/2024 at 8:07 PM, Malacoda said:

Was it just me or did Roger Taylor look disturbingly pretty in that video?

 

Just me then. 

He looks like Kaley Cuoco.

On 12/31/2023 at 11:07 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Happy New Year for tonight boys!

Can you all make sure you stay alive for at least 24 hours, or I'll think I've cursed one of us 

 

Thank you Steve. And as we await the annual Last Night of the Somme the same to each and everyone who reads these pages.

On 12/29/2023 at 4:26 PM, Malacoda said:

Interesting.  And, once again, shows that you'd really have to know your onions before you tried to prove anything with CI.  I think these had nothing to do with T&P as these were from 1949 and T&P started reprinting them in 1951.  It's hard to imagine how much money these must have generated for Gilbertons. 

Both titles were US comic sized, and not part of T&P. I think when the US CI series came to a stop I heard that Kantner (?) himself moved to London to oversee the Joint European series as with all the various Countries/Languages the European market was more lucrative than the US one had ever been.
 

On 12/29/2023 at 9:07 AM, themagicrobot said:

There are loads of pulp experts over at https://boards.cgccomics.com/forum/98-pulp-magazines/ but I guess 99% of them are in the US. As for Classics Illustrated it was repackaged in too many languages for anyone to collect all possible variants. Was T&P responsible for this issue? If so then why a different version with a different price? It still says it is number 2.

And I knew Marvel produced their own run of Classics Comics but I must admit I had never before come across this Marvel UK series (a Digest size?) until just now.

 

I have a full set of these "A Classic In Pictures", all twelve of them. From memory they were published by a firm called Amex in London. The interiors were just in one colour iirc, a rather muted red/brown. They were obviously a clone of CI but I don't know if there was any connection to T&P.
There was also another British series of a similar vein called Famous Stories in Pictures which GCD gives us the following as being the publisher(s) : 

On 12/24/2023 at 10:32 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

I'll be on the road shortly, so

Merry Christmas Boys! 

And the same to you Steve.