John Jackson Miller

Didn't intend to step into anyone else's dispute here — just a niche topic I try to add something to when it's raised. Have a nice weekend!

On 10/7/2022 at 2:40 PM, N e r V said:

I’ve seen your site but I’ll respectfully disagree with you on it simply on the grounds it wasn’t just some Giordano remark but from others who actually worked at Marvel I had heard this from. As a kid growing up in the Bronze Age I was fascinated with those numbers too and long before I saw others like Mark Evanier posting on his site about their accuracy being questioned as I posted earlier it was Archie Goodwin who worked for Marvel, DC and Warren who was the first to burst my bubble on their accuracy way back in the 1980’s. When I was helping with material on the Marvel Masterworks program with several different Marvel employees i struck up a conversation about them with one of them and they had the same response on their accuracy. I have no doubt many of them are accurate or close numbers but if you give me 10 glasses of water and only 2 or 3 are poisoned am I going to try all 10? I just don’t see the point of trying to come up with some kind of legit system to hang your hat on when in the same breath some of the numbers could be errors or approximations or if you believe some of the old employees, “fiction”? 
 

Anyway the people who actually knew now are dead or mostly dead so people can believe what they want. I only commented on what I’ve been told by others closer to the source. I have no doubt the publishers never fudged the numbers and that those audits on the thousands and thousands of comics and magazines published were thoroughly performed by high level audits….

While my first decade of collecting the filings was really about finding them, the last fifteen years, as the hunt for the rare ones slowed things down, have been more about forensic accounting. About developing other sources of data for comparison to determine the accuracy of any given publisher at any given time. And certainly it does vary — Marvel's reports range from bulletproof to messy in the editorial chaos of the late 1970s, and even clockwork Archie made blunders now and again.

And that's where statistical tools come in handy. We don't throw out all the baseball stats because players are on steroids; rather, the universe of statistics tells us who's probably on steroids, and where we should be putting our asterisks.

To be clear, I do include what editors have told me — and others — in what I look at. But it's just one more type of evidence that needs to be tested. When leaked material with other internal numbers mirror what the Statement cites, the question then becomes whether the editor knew the information, or just was passing on hearsay. What I've found generally is they just printed what they were sent, but I try to keep my eyes open.

Believe me, my final reporting of this material will make clear where all the hazards are, and how many grains of salt are required with each report!

On 10/6/2022 at 9:51 PM, N e r V said:

Those published sales figures aren’t really accurate. That’s been discussed and known for years. The first time I had that pointed out to me was from Archie Goodwin in the very early 1980’s when I first inquired about them. Any number of pros since have dismissed them.

From Mark Evaniers website:

 

”The sales figures published in the little Statement of Ownership boxes that ran in some comics were sometimes rough approximations and occasionally pure fiction.”

 

There is absolutely no way to tell how close or really far off they were then or now.

Respectfully, this is untrue. I've collected all of them, have compared them with internal numbers from several publishers, including Marvel and National/DC — and I've compared them as well with the Audit Bureau of Circulation's audits. Not the publishers' assertions to the ABC, but rather the actual audits where the auditors visited the companies involved. And in the later Diamond Exclusive era, they're definitely accurate, because I have records on everything that shipped in North America.

The vast majority of figures are valid and reliable — and internally consistent across time, without the randomness you'd see if they were fabricated by what was, in reality, an ever-changing group of people who had no record of what they'd reported before.

My detailed research into this matter in the 1960-64 period found that the Statement numbers were on average a little high — less than 5% — because they didn't have returns yet on some of the issues being reported on. Again, consistent with what you'd expect.

The "pure fiction"  remark, I expect, relates to a Giordano interview where he said during his tenure at Charlton "we just made them up." I looked into that for my site years ago and determined that the years before his time were more reliable. It's also worth noting the paperwork on these things came from the business offices, so the editors tended not to do anything more than send them to be typeset. That was certainly the case with the ones I ran as a magazine editor.

I'd agree there were definitely some approximations — and simple errors — but the more reliable publishers were a lot more solid. (The forms were also, of course, a federal filing, which the better publishers took seriously because postal permits were so expensive and dear and worth keeping. In the early years, the Statement forms actually had to go to a notary public!)

I've done the work on this, and I expect to show it in a lot more detail in the future. But I have online an FAQ on postal statements, which touches on a lot of this.

On 9/26/2022 at 8:45 AM, MAR1979 said:

I do like the notation "Marvel Multi-Pack Edition" much better than the false "Marvel Whitman".

I've tweeted on this already here, but the printings were created to order for Whitman and ceased to exist when Whitman's order ended, so the term is a reasonable one, regardless of whether anyone else — other bagged jobbers or comics shops — were ever sold copies out of the run.

That said, it's great that CGC has separated out the two eras, as it helps people with the history a little. The Direct Market was becoming a big deal in 1977, but it didn't rate its own printing yet. But a large order from a firm that sold into department stores did nudge Marvel to do something.

Kirk asked me what I could find out about this in my files. I expect they would have been ordered by DC, who would have gone to the printer (either Ronald’s or World Color Press, at that point) and had them change out the black plate with paste-ups of the mall logos. The malls likely could not have done it themselves, nor, probably, could an outside jobber. Whoever it was had access to DC’s negatives at the printer.

I have looked through all the issues in that timeframe for Amazing Heroes, Comics Buyer’s Guide, and Capital City’s Internal Correspondence – and found no mention of this promotion. However, I consider it is likely it was connected in some manner with Superman’s 50^th anniversary celebration, which DC sponsored many festivities and special products (including commemorative coins) around. Most events were focused on February 29, 1988, but the celebration extended to the International Superman Exposition in Cleveland on June 16. (Adventures #443 would have hit direct market stands in late April.)

As issues to promote goes, it’s kind of a peculiar choice -- and in fact, what was supposed to be in the book changed right before its release. In this timeframe, DC was throwing all its Direct Market  promo efforts into making Action Comics Weekly a success — ultimately, a futile effort. As originally scheduled, #443 would have actually been a middle chapter of a trilogy of issues, the others being Superman #20 and #21. But then John Byrne quit, and DC quickly shuffled a 30-page Jerry Ordway story into #443.

My guess – and it is only a guess – is that the books were part of some 50^th anniversary year promotion, and that Adventures of Superman was selected because it was a more logical choice for the mass market than Action Comics Weekly, which wouldn’t have been just about Superman. The fact that they’re nonreturnable suggests they weren’t sold by Waldenbooks, but rather offered in some manner by mall management.

That’s all I was able to find on this during a cursory search; I’m certain someone with DC would be able to contribute more.

I got a nice batch of photos from a reader of a Books-A-Million newsstand with returnable copies, taken in early September (it would seem). Everything squares up with the list as we have it; nothing later than an August 16 title.

The August 16 theory plus Harley Quinn #26 is getting stronger all the time.

The Captain suggested to me that the 8/16 Direct Market issues might have been the true cutoff and that the 8/23 shipping newsstand Harley Quinn #26 may have been a fluke, since none of the other books of that week have been found. I checked the Diamond shipping lists, and voila, Harley Quinn was supposed to be an 8/16 book in the DM and shipped a week late. Strong case forming here...

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SHIPPING UPDATES ' 07/31/2017 
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VENDOR/TITLE	ITEM CODE	OLD DATE	NEW DATE
Harley Quinn #26 Std./Var.	JUN170287 / JUN170288	08/16/17	08/23/17

Just did, and indeed they do. Thanks. I'm too accustomed to trying to give eBay as much detail as possible to zero in!

Yes, my article is here -- http://blog.comichron.com/2018/02/end-of-era-last-dc-newsstand-issues.html -- and it was a note from Cpt Kirk earlier in the week that inspired me to call DC. If I'd seen this thread I could have saved some searching online!

Note that while Ski gave me a end date for newsstand titles -- August 29 in comic shops specifically -- it is not ironclad that some of these last issues exist, so continued checking should be the order of the day. I will start checking this thread to see what's found.