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themagicrobot

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  • Comic Collecting Interests
    Silver Age
    Bronze Age
    Copper Age
    Comic Magazines
  • Hobbies
    putting comics in the recycling bin

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  1. It certainly looks like it could be a crude stamp of UK £sd old money but again, it seems rather expensive. What years are those two books? For most of the 1960s T&P were happy to sell them to you (not me....I was collecting Michael Moorcocks) for Two Shillings. PS: There is an Ace Double D-177 written by C H Thames with the best ever title for a book I've ever come across. Violence is Golden. I wonder why no one had thought of that one before?!?
  2. I have a folder containing two dozen random odd comics from other shores. Started 40 years ago the aim was to collect one example from each country (until I realised just how many countries there were with their own comic industry). Why did they (for a time) call Batman "Leather Patch" in Sweden? And here Superboy is called Cloud Kid. He's lost his "S" on his chest for reasons unknown.
  3. When young I loved the sdrawkcab world of Bizarro stories in Adventure Comics. In fact I have just purchased this beat up old comic to read about the Bizarro Legionnaires. It has a bonus on the cover of my favourite T&P price stamp AND a Curt Swan autograph. And all for £6.99. When I have read it I will stick it in a picture frame having just purchased a box of 20 new/old stock ones of the perfect size from a charity shop. Even tatty comics look fine (well...sort of ?!?) when framed. Who needs CGC encapsulation? Who was it that said "Books furnish a room"?
  4. I once owned FF 10 - 110 and a few earlier issues. That would have been about the time @Malacoda was reading No 171. It is tempting to leave that first Annual to be opened at a later date but I would want to check the parcel did contain the right comic. I've only ever got the wrong book once out of hundreds of transactions but....... Talking of eBay parcels. A couple of years ago there was an item on the local TV news about a guy who had passed away. When relatives visited his cluttered terraced house the front room was stacked full of hundreds and hundreds of unopened parcels. Further examination of the packages showed that every one contained comics....... I am not a completist, apart from maybe a few titles that only ran to 10 or 20 issues. But I have started cataloguing what I do have just so an xml spreadsheet exists showing what is in the boxes. I am perhaps a quarter of the way through the task. I never had the first Fantastic Four Annual, but I expect to unearth numbers 7,9,10,11 at some point.
  5. 5/- for a copy of Analog in 1966 seems daylight robbery. In 1963 they cost a mere 2/6d. I guess, as SF readers were older, they thought they could get away with it. When Analog increased to 60¢ we were charged 6/-. If a 25¢ Wonder Woman could be sold here for 7½p a 50¢ magazine ought to have been 15p or 3/-
  6. Did they keep the numbering going just for the Second Class Postage and the 600 subscribers (who might not have liked the new format anyway)? I would have started the new horror HOM at number one. But numbering with comics can be bonkers (usually Charltons) even Marvels sometimes. For example, I came across this comic, which may not have been distributed here, which I might have purchased at a London Comic Mart when it was new. According to the GCD there were only 4 issues. So how come this says number 6?? It seems the small print says Marvel Adventures while the first two issues say Marvel Adventure?!? All six issues say Marvel Adventure on the cover however. And Marvel Adventure seems a good title for a series that they let go to waste. PS: It's interesting how they play around with the original cover artwork on the reprint. Thinking about it, they were reprinting something that was barely nine years old. That's like yesterday to me nowadays ?!?
  7. House of Mystery 173 contains a Statement of Ownership statement. The average print run was stated to be 306,000. An average number of 157,000 reached circulation. How many of those would be returns that would end up in the UK at Thorpe & Porter? An average number of 147,000 are classed as Office Use/Left Over/Unaccounted for/Spoiled after Printing. How many of those (if any) would end up in the UK at Thorpe and Porter? I've pondered this question before, but what did they do with half the print run (of this title and many others) that they never ever distributed in the US?? And as they had these figures why did they continue to print 300,000 of each issue if they didn't intend to distribute 300,000?? And for a single issue nearest to the Statement of Ownership filing date House of Mystery had 600 subscribers. For the previous four years the comic had featured the superhero J'onn J'onzz and for two years Robby Reed with his "H" Hero Dial. Those 600 subscribers would be caught by surprise with issue 174. Gone were the fantasy/science-fiction/superhero stuff and overnight it became a Horror comic. Perhaps the stories weren't quite as gruesome as back in the 1950s, but for such an abrupt change why didn't they bother to mention it in No 173s letters page???
  8. Dich Turpin appeared in umpteen issues of Thriller Picture Library. All the covers were different. Dunno about the interiors. And Gold Key did a Dich Turpin too!!
  9. So there's no way to say Philip K. ? Perhaps Philip KDick or Philip KindredDick? I'm still waiting for Postman Pat to deliver that Graphic Novel about his (brief but complicated) life.
  10. As for me, I am old enough to have seen it in 1967 but then I was too young to fully appreciate it. It was finally repeated, as you say, late at night in the mid 1970s. But then I had yet to own a video recorder. The Prisoner is like some comics, books, music that you can return to quite a few times and still enjoy. It wouldn't have been made in these days of Pilots and focus groups. Lew Grade (who looks the spitting image of my late Grandfather!?!) trusted his instincts and let Patrick go away (on location no less) and make it with just a handshake. Lew trusted his instincts with others such as Gerry Anderson and Jim Henson and was responsible for many hours of great UK TV in the 1960s and 1970s (that he could sell to the US too). PS: Lew/my Grandfather's double is the one on the left if you were wondering.
  11. I recommend Portmeirion as a day trip or even a holiday. I used to subscribe to the Six of One fanzine and went to a couple of viewings on a big screen in the days before you could obtain the series on VHS/before it had been repeated on satellite TV/before it was available as a tape/DVD partwork from your friendly neighbourhood newsagents. Every episode was odd, yet thought provoking in its own way. "The Girl who was death" was a spoof on James Bond and the like. I recall a scene in a pub where he drinks down his pint until he sees YOU HAVE YOU HAVE BEEN YOU HAVE BEEN POISONED. I surprisingly can't see that on UToob.