rakehell

All part of the service. Juanita.

I'm in! Still processing all the info. Top work as usual, mate. Been concentrating mostly on foreign stuff lately, but I'll definitely be keeping an eye out.

Arguably as common as chips.

Looks like the OO was mainly concerned with foldability on the ST 110. Is there such thing as an origami variant?

Three more Captain Britain for my run - I think my phone is on its last legs. Can't seem to take a clear picture lately.

A press, sure, but that's oil on the back covers. Maybe I should just chuck 'em on a hot wash & hang 'em out to dry. Of course, then I could market them as Covid-19 free...

Another pair of pence rags - I was going to take a better picture, then I thought, what bloody difference does it make? I have to stop buying this cr*p. Before long, my collection will be no gap and all filler. I knew they were ropey, just not this ropey. A word of warning: never buy any comic from the UK if you haven't seen the back cover - It may have seen duty as a fish and chips wrapper.

Yeah. The King Kong thing has only just wandered onto my radar. Don't know enough about it to say, but I'd bet it was produced in the UK. The other UK pence variants of the standard treasury editions were printed in the US with the regular US copies & the Whitmans; they're all the same, just with a different price point. As far as the UK printed things go, there isn't really a 'standard' size for anything. You'll get variation within a single title. That's part of the reason the US printed books stand out.

Nice set! I'm working on a full set of the original Marvel series, myself. I'm trying for copies of all the variants of each issue, 35c, UK, Canadian & direct vs. newsstand. I'm only about 50 copies in so far...

Try finding any high grade pence copies. They're like rocking horse poop.

Hmmm... I used to believe pence variants were reprints. Then I looked into it and found a whole bunch of evidence that made me change my belief. That's the funny thing about facts; they remain facts whether you believe them or not. For arguments sake, we'll use my favorite example (again!) of Star Wars 2 from August, 1977. The standard US (30c), price experiment US (35c) & UK pence (12p) were all run off the press at the same time. The inside pages of these are from the same run. They all have the same standard US price indicia: 30c. The only way they vary from each other is the changed price slug (changed, mind you, not reprinted), which only required a pause in printing, rather than a stop, wait.... wait.... wait & eventually (3 months later? 6?) restart. I have very little interest in the Whitman question. They don't come up all that often in the UK. I wish they did; I remember buying multi-packs when I was a kid in the US. It was a good way to bulk out my pile. Thinking about it though, I find it makes more logical sense for Marvel to make 2 (or 3 or a dozen) changes to a single print run than to dig the old plates out & reset a separate run for a comparatively tiny batch of reprints.

Recent ebay UK score - No great shakes, really, but a few gaps filled.

Your wish is my command Fog I said, I ain't payin' no ten pee to get into no toilet cubicle.

Is that all parking damage? At least they saved you a space.

I still can't resist a low-ish Buy-it-Now - Mostly readers, but they fill a few gaps.

My experience of barcodes is that they don't come with prices pre-loaded. They're only there to identify the product, not necessarily the price. Also, they were purely decorative over here. Very few UK retailers in the 70s, especially retailers of comics, would have had anything more sophisticated than a biscuit tin to complete their transactions. The only early adopters of barcode technology were grocery stores. When I was running comic shops in Birmingham & Nottingham for Stateside in the early 90s we had to manually enter 16 digit codes for every damn thing because they were too cheap-*ss to buy a barcode scanner.

This looks like a printing order thing. Like maybe they ran the newsstand, then changed the price slug to pence & swapped out the barcode & then changed the price slug to a diamond, but kept the slashed direct barcode (or Spidey head).

It's not something that I've looked that deeply into either. Though just glancing through some of my books (& a couple of things on my ebay watchlist) I noticed a couple of things. This is one from 1965, so a lot earlier, but deffo T&P. They were still on it in 1969 - In the 70s, though, these stickers seem to be the norm - Don't know at what point in the distribution process the stickers were stuck, or by whom. They look too uniform to be shop stickers.

Very nice. Not easy to find, either. You're right about the newsprint. It tends to get a bit furry around the edges. 9.2 is a solid grade for this.

Nice copy. Does it have the mask?

Missed out on this issue myself a couple of weeks ago. It came up in a lot on ebay UK with a Monsters Unlimited & something else (For Monsters Only, I think). I'm just too cheap for my own good.

This peep would...

Four more for my Captain Britain run - Only 35 to go...

Four more for my Captain Britain run - Only 35 to go...