themagicrobot

The Westerns have Len Miller 6d ink stamps which would have been correct for when those comics rocked up in the UK in the late 1950s/early 1960s. But Jungle Comics published in the same period appears to have a 1/- stamp bottom right putting it into circulation here years after it was printed.

Film and developing was so expensive when you needed all your student grant to buy beer cigarettes and comics I did take some photos in my local town before they pulled down the cinema and the massive factory where my mother worked but couldn’t document everything I wished to In the 1970s and into the 1980s there was a second hand record shop smack bang in the middle of Nottingham down an alley The front window was heaps and heaps of singles covered in cobwebs and dead wasps LPs were piled 6 foot high and invariably fell over as you walked past In fact you walked on top of discarded records. The whole place was just like one of those “Hoarded Buried Alive” TV shows The proprietor sat in the middle of this C20th version of the third circle of hell and if you were brave enough to dig and find something interesting he would sell it to you for the first price that came into his head…usually coppers Wish someone had recorded that to contrast and compare with a HMV or Virgin megastore (although in 1973 the Virgin record shop in Birmingham was quite eccentric too)

The demise of the junk shop and the rise of the Charity shop and the Interweb saw the end of decades of bargains. Even Car boot sales no longer have any bargains. I think the magic word here is "junk". Thirty or forty years ago I collected old car and motorcycle magazines. You could go to Autojumbles and buy a box full for a quid. They were just considered old junk. At a recent visit to an Autojumble I saw a dealer selling old magazines and brochures all bagged and boarded with prices starting at £20.

It seems there is (was?) a Jack Trevor Story Memorial Cup (and $1000) presented for humorous writing. In 2009 it was presented by Michael Moorcock. There were conditions: that the money be spent within two weeks and the recipient have nothing to show for it by the end of that period. This recalls Story’s remark to a bankruptcy judge when asked what had happened to money from his films The Trouble with Harry and Live Now, Pay Later: “You know how it is, judge. Two hundred or two thousand. It always lasts a week to a fortnight.”

Of course. She died not that long ago aged 103. But wasn't the definitive version of Lili Marleen by Marlene Dietrich? Vor der KaserneVor dem großen TorStand eine LaterneUnd steht sie noch davorSo woll'n wir uns da wieder seh'nBei der Laterne wollen wir steh'nWie einst Lili Marleen. PS Whilst I'm here I note that many of these pulps and paperbacks are purchased more for their covers than their contents. I am having a spell of buying old paperbacks to read. Anything written by Jack Trevor Story is clever and funny and a pleasure from start to finish especially I sit in Hangar Lane where he is compared to Proust. I've sat in a car in a traffic jam in Hanger Lane many times but luckily never had the complicated sex life of Jack's lead characters (all based on his own life which was wilder than his stories)..

Off off off topic. War had been declared a few weeks ago but you could still read the adventures of Brick Bradford in french France. And did you know that hurrah is french for hooray?

No time to read any comics today. It is the school holidays and I was required to amuse these two all day. Gave the one on the right an infant Spidey comic I'd owned for 20 years (because it came with a fab Spider-Man mask I recall). Gave the one on the left a 1975 UK Fanzine. Don't think he'll read it.

All the Pop stars used to read comics. The Move's second LP was called Kimota I think.

October 1975. Britain's DCs restart? Did they stop?

So of all the people who ever interviewed Stan, would you have ever guessed that Marc Bolan would have been one of them.

Off topic but here's a nice colour cover to break up the text. Amazing Spider-Man No 181 and No 33 are my two favouites of that title. I like the altered cover for our No 300.

In Fantasy Unlimited 25 April 1975 in the letters page someone writes:- "Why are Thorpe and Porter distributing more recent DCs than they used to, with cover dates current instead of 3 months behind?" Alan replies:- "They now receive "run-ons", copies especially printed for the UK instead of unsold issues".

It is bound to be a (small) percentage of the total that were printed but I doubt we will ever know unless someone finds old Thorpe and Porter paperwork in an attic. Surely T&P would have specified either a precise x number of each of the individual titles (more of some, less of others) or x number of comics with a particular month on the cover. And as once upon a time 50% of comics printed were returned unsold does that mean for some titles the UK had 12% arriving here compared to the 100% of sold issues in the States. And some of those returns might have belatedly ended up here increasing our percentage. Marvels and DCs from the 1960s seem to have survived in greater numbers here in the UK than our own Beanos and Lions with their newsprint covers. They often ended up along with yesterdays newspapers being used to light coal fires way back when I lived in a house with no central heating. PS: Have recently unearthed a couple of Fantasy Unlimited fanzines from 1975 which I plan to read tomorrow in the sunshine (if it ever stops raining).

I like the cover (and interior story) of the UK Sider-Man 300 with its subtle changes from Amazing Spider-Man 181.

I like Kirby's art in the 1960s and in those two magazines but was underwhelmed by much of his DC work. By the time of Kamandi he was just going through the motions and relying on his assistants. This weeks mystery. JLA 152 and 153 were both "Giant" 60 cent issues. Why did Thorpe and Porter charge more for 152 than 153 ??

These Miraclemans are either cheap or ridiculously expensive depending where you look and who is selling them. Just bought this one for £10 as it completes my collection of 13 issues. I'm curious to find out who or what is Supercoat?!?

It is not a unicorn, but also not that common. When I purchased a copy of Captain Miracle a year ago I had to pay £12 to win it which was more than i wanted to spend. Perhaps prices might have increased slightly. There were a few other titles produced by Mick Anglo himself in 1960/1961 too. As you say he later produced Miracleman comics for Thorpe and Porter in 1965 and packaged strips for City's TV Tornado in 1967. Mick was busy with comics magazines and books throughout the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. https://www.comics.org/publisher/3528/ These are currently for sale on eBay.

Yes, I'm aware that they are DCs but it seems they wanted to keep some clear water between their usual output and this (failed?) experiment. I wonder what the background to them is. Was the chance to do something completely different the lure that led Jack to DC from his decade at Marvel? Or was it something he had been working on in his spare time (?) that he pitched to DC? I assume it was creator-owned? By 1971 comics were no longer just for kids. You would have thought that DC would want a share of the growing black and white magazine market. They could have produced more adult (Batman or Spectre for example) material free from comic code restrictions.

If you want the satisfaction of owning every single comic produced by a Publisher it helps to choose one that didn't issue all that many books. Hampshire Distributors Ltd only managed two so I am the proud (?) owner of the full run. Kirby put a lot of work into these but we must assume sales were poor. The second issue of Days of the Mob was never issued (or completely drawn) but did appear in book form along with the first issue 10 years ago. In the States In the Days of the Mob was released a month before Spirit World. Perhaps Thorpe and Porter belatedly received theirs the other way round as Days of the Mob is stamped at a higher price than Spirit World displays. That magazine cheerfully warned us that the world would end in 1983.

Hmm. I wonder when they discontinued that top left box? 20 years ago? In more recent times it is only used "ironically". Note the MMMS stamp rather than the Comic Code stamp.

Well spotted Gary. I was beginning to think the only copy available with a 1/- price was Alan's. I think this cover looks better as you see the full cosmic surfboard.

That looks like a Mark 1 Ford Capri produced between 1969 and 1974 so 1972ish is a good call. I frequented a similar shop that sold "Books Mags Films Photos" in my home town despite only being 11 years old. The window displayed numerous Monster mags and the more innocuous paperbacks which was basically a cover for the more profitable stuff sold there. The soft porn was inside and there was a counter with a grille like a post office or a betting shop. Serious stuff was produced from a rear room to that counter for adults on request. Some of the regulars headed straight for the back room. In the front were tables stacked with Famous Monsters of Filmland, paperbacks and similar. Underneath the table was three or four cardboard boxes full of comics. That was where I purchased X-Men No 1 and early Fantastic Fours. Or I just went in with 10 comics and emerged with 5 different ones. Alas he was shut down in 1968 as the local magistrate didn't like porn, pulp paperbacks. horror magazines OR comics.

According to Amazon number 53 is released August 1st. At £26 I don't think I'll bother. I have numbers 4 to 50. Instead I intend to buy the facsimile edition of Number 1. Then I will see if I can bear to discover what bargains I could have bought in 1971 (not that I had any money in 1971...)

In 1977 I discovered that a Triumph Herald Estate had a capacity of 5000 comics

That’s a good idea. I have a car to sell. I could fill the boot with this heap of Viz magazines I keep tripping over i once bought a car that had a boot full of music cartridges but the player had been removed by the seller in the boot was one of those joke arms that you hung out the back so folks thought there was a body in the boot. Thats a trunk for those on the wrong side of the Atlantic. And the hood is that canvas thing above my head not the piece of metal above the engine.