Redshade

I second the request for pictures. A deep rabbit hole??? My oh my it's bottomless.

A good rule is to remember is that the UK chaged from the old style coinage in 1971. Thus the old "d" symbol became the new "p" symbol. So yes the comics are early 70s. I too have been wondering as to the whereabouts of Marwood.

Hi Steve. Just a few incoherent ramblings from me for no other reason than to prove that I still read your posts. I wonder if the above handwritten date was done in the American style? This would make the date 10th August (or 16th August) and ties in with the fact that US comics were on the newsstand several months before their cover date. It also reinforces the fact that these were then remaindered and sent overseas. Dos the "AM Co" stamp possibly refer to Arnold Miller (The father of Len)? As to the Miller 9d UKPV being overstamped with a Miller 6d rubber stamp I wonder if it were because the comics were received after the cover date and so the price was reduced because they were now "old"?

The two may well be acquainted but Muphry is indeed an individual entity. Look up "Muphry's Law".

I think that I mean that your research and presentation are unsurpassed and not the opposite as I implied in my too quick reply above. Should've proofread it. Muphry's law eh?

As always Steve your research and presentation surpasses none. I was too busy reading comics as a youngster (of course) and ne wiht else mattered.

And only a complete wally would fail to see that! I don't know how to enlarge images and my poor old peepers couldn't see what was going on. And anyway the possessive noun takes an apostrophe so the blurb on the bottom left should read "America's". Yah boo to you Mr Editor (Stan?).

So what is that Steve?

Thanks for the reply but after contemplation I decided that I didn't want to drag you into the *ahem* debate.

Don't worry about it Steve, there are too many to read. It was started this time by the news that Tim Bildhuaser had been "let go" by CBCS. He was their Foreign Edition specialist. The posters all agreed that Tim was the bees' knees and that they would all be boycotting CBCS, then the usual moaning ensued about all of the wrongly labelled stuff that people had had back from CGC who it seems is very cavalier when describing foreign comics. It then descended into the whole Editions or Reprints argument. I'm staying out of it for now, we've heard it all a thousand times. I'm glad now that I didn't drag Pinkerton into the swamp.

It is : Foreign Comic Collector Magazine (Official Group). I'll try a link but my attempts at such are inept at best. https://www.facebook.com/groups/274684996585171/594815314572136/?comment_id=601342583919409&notif_id=1591942847597343&notif_t=group_comment_mention

This very issue is being discussed on a FB page that I am a member of, may I quote you on said site?

Thanks for the shout out Mike. So glad they arrived safely.

Buster Bollock has a better ring to it don't you think?

May I add my welcome to the threads. Marwood has done a ball-breaking amount of work and I too have been exhorting him to publish his findings in one medium or another. Maybe one day.

Note that Spellbound 56 uses the splash page from Avengers 5 as its cover, whilst Spellbound 41 uses the actual cover of TTA 35 and in both instances the fuller original artwork is used. How on earth could CGC say that SB 56 is a "UK Edition" of an American comic when no such comic with that cover was ever produced in the US?

MR SigS/MarwoodandI. Remind me please. Were all AS-M 1s printed with a T&P indicia or just the pence variant?

I have just found this on https://www.comicsvalue.com/Amazing-Fantasy-15-Alan-Class-1963-UK-Edition-Variant-1-SpiderMan-RARE-not-CGC/121253519637.html Alan Class Comics was a British comics publishing company between 1959 and 1989, owned by Alan Class (born in London, England July 21, 1937). The company produced anthology titles, reprinting comics stories from many U.S. publishers of the 1940s to 1960s in a black and white digest format for a U.K. audience. Since the books were wider than the American originals, all the cover art was visible where American printings were cut-off . The reason: By the 1960s the width of American comics shrank while artists used the same size art boards. So the American versions look cut-off while Alan Class covers don't.

And goodnight to you my good sir (although I'm a bit of a night-owl and having just opened this evening's bottle shall be here for a goodly few hours yet).

Sorry Steve given the amount of reprints out there I just cannot believe it feasible that extra artwork would be commissioned when a foreign editor could just blow up and recrop if he had a larger space to fill. Indeed I have seen foreign editions where the covers were a blown up internal panel. We'll have to agree to differ on this Steve. I do seem to recall that you were not totally convinced when we discussed this previously. Occam's razor and all that. All opinions given are my own of course and I retain the right to be a complete and utter nincompoop at all times,

Do you mean that there were pence variants of Whitman editions?

Not sure what you are getting at here Steve. The US version has cropped the original artwork. The foreign reprinters obviously had access to the original uncropped artwork which had more of the cop on the right (as seen in the UK reprint) and more of the bloke on the left (as seen in the Italian reprint). I'm not claiming the foreign publishers used all of the original artwork and must have cropped the original artwork in ways that suited them. It is unthinkable that UK editors would commission artists to add more art on the right and equally unlikely that Italian editors would have commissioned more artwork to the left.

PS. This means that the UK and other foreign publishers would have received the full (larger) artwork which the US publishers had to crop. This "extra" artwork can be seen on (tens of?) thousands of UK and other foreign reprints.

I think that this has been discussed on these boards and elsewhere before. With one insufficiently_thoughtful_person claiming that the overseas publishers commisioned artists to add an extra inch to the edge of the covers to accomodate the wider size of foreign reprints (tens of thousands of them!). This is a stupid idea as UK publishers could have blown up the original art to fit larger covers. The most reasonable explanation I have read was that US artists were still using standard (ie GA) size boards and that they had to get rid of some of the art to accomodate the smaller SA and modern sized comics.

No I don't think so, in fact I'd stick my neck out and say never! As Marwood says above they (the US publishers/printers) used the US cover and changed the price from cents to pence but did not bother to change much else including the Curtis logo.