themagicrobot

High functioning? I wish. Anyway did the cluster find out that the Recreational Vehicle logo definitely belonged to Roberts and Vintner? I read somewhere that they mostly dealt with "adult" publications and paperbacks though for a time they were responsible for New Worlds Science Fiction and the monthly Impulse paperback which was numbered like the Badger Books series. This looks more like it was actually printed onto this Charlton Monster mag. If it was a stamp then Iris was very good at her job. Earlier Charlton Monster Mags look like they could have been stamped in house by Len Miller's staff (I think he had at least one).

They may have been T&P 6d stamps or they could just possibly be Woolworths stamps. Through the 1960s until at least 1968 Woolworths sold remaindered comics at 6d a throw. I remember sorting through stacks of Pat Boone and "boring" Dells in various branches of Woolworths, They were there for months until they either sold or the staff threw them away. In 1967/1968 Woolworths were full of King Comics still selling for 6d but luckily without any ink stamps spoiling the covers.

It would be interesting to know what areas of the UK Miller actually covered. Being based in London I suspect there was a limit to how far north their distribution reached. Thorpe and Porter were in Leicester and appear to have been "sole distributors" of American periodicals to the thousands of newsagents they supplied soft/hard porn (and comics) to. As I have mentioned before, as a child living in the Midlands I never saw any Harvey, Archie, IW or Charlton comics on the stands (unless on holiday). Charltons appeared in my neck of the woods only once Thorpe and Porter were involved.

The fact that CGC are accepting submissions of comics directly from the UK, Italy and Spain (elsewhere??) then inevitably they are going to get a greater variety of titles (and different-sized comics) as time goes on. There is more to life than just Marvel comics. (I wonder if they have a slab large enough for my "highly collectible" 1964 Big One No 1??) https://www.cgccomics.uk/news/article/9882/the-bolaffi-auction-group-official-submission-center/ https://www.cgccomics.uk/submit/how-to-submit/ https://www.cgccomics.uk/news/article/9893/London-comic-con-2022/

No time to post here. Too busy cutting up the cover of my Miller Mystic 40 into postage stamp-sized pieces.

Rob better get a move on whilst there are still people alive who give a damn. The Panini comics must outnumber UK Marvels and will last longer having better quality covers/paper. Without a glossy cover UK comics are so fragile when they are approaching 50 years old. PS: As this comic contains the Spiderman origin from AF15, half of FF No 1 and half of the first Hulk comic I'm surprised it (and the other 1970s issues with all the classic Marvel stuff) are so much cheaper than Alan Class comics containing Marvel heroes. Luckily for Rob I can never resist a book about comics. For example, I got this yesterday. The universes may not be current but you can't call them lost.

Alan Class reprinted a fair number of the Tower stuff. Thunder Action from 1986 is what you're thinking of. I'm sure I posted some cover images here previously. There were indeed new stories in the 4 issues published along with Tower reprints (that may or may not have been licensed). https://www.comics.org/series/67112/covers/ There is an issue currently for sale on eBay as we speak.

Perhaps we should be asking Stu. He works for the law firm Goodman, Lieber, Kurtzberg and Holliway. I believe they're at Timely Plaza.

Martin Goodman thought he could save money by switching to American News. When that option went away perhaps IND were the next cheapest option available?? marvel.fandom.com says: Atlas shrugs From 1952 to late 1956, Goodman distributed this torrent of comics to newsstands through his self-owned distributor, Atlas. He then switched to American News Company, the nation's largest distributor and a virtual monopoly—which shortly afterward lost a Justice Department lawsuit and discontinued its business. As historian and author Gerard Jones explains, the company in 1956. "...had been found guilty of restraint of trade and ordered to divest itself of the newsstands it owned. Its biggest client, George Delacorte, announced he would seek a new distributor for his Dell Comics and paperbacks. The owners of American News estimated the effect that would have on their income. Then they looked at the value of the New Jersey real estate where their headquarters sat. They liquidated the company and sold the land. The company ... vanished without a trace in the suburban growth of the 1950s." Stan Lee, in a 1988 interview, recalled that Goodman: "...had gone with the American News Company. I remember saying to him, 'Gee, why did you do that? I thought that we had a good distribution company.' His answer was like, 'Oh, Stan, you wouldn't understand. It has to do with finance.' I didn't really give a damn, and I went back to doing the comics. Later, we were left without a distributor and we couldn't go back to distributing our own books because the fact that Martin quit doing it and went with American News had gotten the wholesalers very angry ... and it would have been impossible for Martin to just say, 'Okay, we'll go back to where we were and distribute our books.' [We had been] turning out 40, 50, 60 books a month, maybe more, and [now] the only company we could get to distribute our books was our closest rival, National (DC) Comics. Suddenly we went ... to either eight or 12 books a month, which was all [that DC's] Independent News Distributors would accept from us." For that and other reasons, including a recession in the overall economy, Atlas retrenched in 1957.

How much they cost depended if it were Gladys or Ethel weilding the stamper thingy.

That's what it says top left?!?

This is my favourite photo from the link above. Gary obviously loved comics but kept things in perspective. Lean your ladder against the comics you have nailed to the wall. Stack them on shelves like last weeks newspapers. Chuck them in any old cardboard box you have to hand. Coincidently I was only reading my Marvel Super-Heroes 16 (and the previous Fantasy Masterpieces) a few weeks ago when looking for my London Editions/Egmont Batmans. They all came out of an old cardboard box very much like Gary's!?!

I didn't know about the stuff regarding the Treasuries above from @Malacoda. That is why this whole thread is building up to something quite important. Meanwhile, here is something unimportant. When London Editions/Egmont had the DC franchise for UK reprints in the 80s/90s they produced some nice looking Batman and Superman monthlies. Magazine sized artwork looked good. In 1991 they decided to try a weekly comic but pulled the plug after only a few weeks. Heroes of 1991 came with"free gifts" in the first three issues of postcards reproducing old Adventure comics. As this was before the Interweb they borrowed the comics from 30th Century Comics. Yes, they were going that long ago. So you get postcards with Thorpe and Porter stamps proudly on display.

You are correct Albert. it was a rabbit and not a duck. Just found the original ad in Amazing Spider-Man 38.

This thread is going off topic again. Don't shout at me. A lifetime ago I actually worked at Bairns-wear. Perhaps you are the only UK Harvey "collector" that looks at the small print let alone looks up Harvey comics in these particular boards. I probably own a mere 4 Harvey comics. I never ever saw them as a kid where I lived in the 1960s and assumed they must have been distributed by Miller, as were the Charltons. Charltons in the 1960s never made it northwards to my neck of the woods until Thorpe and Porter were involved. One Harvey Giant I own is Baby Huey in Duckland 2 from the early 1960s. It is a Canadian variant so Galactus knows how it ended up in the UK, or into my hands. Did anyone ever satisfactorily explain why Canadian comics cost so much more? I thought half the population there lived within 50 miles of the US border so there wasn't much more transport involved. I always wanted one of those Hulk sweatshirts where he's pulling a rope on the front. Did I imagine this or on the back of the shirt you see him from behind. The rope is attached to a small toy duck on wheels. When you were a Spidey completist I'm sure you wore one of these.

One man's fish is another man's poisson. So it's not concerning distributed US published comics in the UK 1959 - 1982 then? Probably Knitting Patterns.

I remember reading https://boards.cgccomics.com/topic/501003-book-collecting-seems-harder-today-then-it-was-last-year/?do=findComment&comment=12108770 at the time and actually typing a list of stuff I wondered may then be on the radar of @Get Marwood & I now he's covered the mainstream and beyond in such detail. I love a good mystery but doubt we will find out any more until he has purchased sufficient amounts at the right price.

Collecting is a very strange hobby. It is basically the purchase of items that will never be used, for to do so would decrease their value. In April 2020 when I assumed the end of the world was nigh I purchased a sports car on a whim. What with Covid 19, working from home full time,needing to use a different car for "normal" things like transporting family and an elderly relative around, I'm wondering if I could get a giant plastic box from CGC to put the car in. It's going nowhere and sitting outside because the garage is full of boxes of unread comics/books etc.

For a minute there you had me quite worried as I thought it was you who collected Genesis records Albert. That may apply to the vast majority who post here. It is titled the CGC boards/forums after all. But there are exceptions. I read the stuff I buy and then throw it in a heap on the floor. I played all the LPs I used to buy. Perhaps I'm wrong and @Get Marwood & I is planning on doubling CGC's turnover and encapsulating all his Miller Charltons etc?

I suppose it all comes back again to being about money and the CGC happy to tell you that your comic is now more valuable because they have decided it has transformed into a Golden Age World's Finest and is no longer deemed to be a black and white reprint comic from a decade later. But by encasing comics in plastic the CGC have become an important tool for preserving these coloured pamphlets for future generations. They have a duty to get their facts right if they are serious about slabbing non-US comics. How can someone be accused of mis-selling a UK Mystic as a USA TTA 13 if that's what it says right there on the label? Even more important, as has been shown in some detail above by @Get Marwood & I (did I do it right this time?), the CGC database is getting messed up with random descriptions when it ought to be building up into an important definitive reference work that people can use, navigate easily and trust. This all needs nipping in the bud before too much more time elapses.

Which is what @Get Marwood & I has been asking for all along. And I think they could add a date if they really tried. And the comic doesn't contain the whole contents of Batman 69 and Detective 179, only selected stories. But recently we get stuff like this:-

Here they got some of it right. Could this cover have been unique to K.G. Murray? Why is it described as a DC comic? DC's Batman 25 has a different cover and was published in 1944.. This is described as a K.G. Murray comic but it isn't number 65. None of them are really "Australian editions" though.

Digest/Pocket sized comics really are another world. There are thousands from dozens of publishers. Did Micron really keep producing these things until as recently as 1984? They must have churned them out weekly. Mainly War and Western and Romance. Some of the 1960s Romance covers really are miniature works of art, often by Spanish artists. This isn't a work of art but certainly has an odd title. And as for this one from World Distributors?

@getmarwood&I I know one of your pleasures in life is catching me out so here's one back at you. Time to spell the Lsd currency that purchased some of the bestest comics of the late 1960s/early 1970s correctly don't you think? We aren't German.

Why confused? There are comics everyone would love to own and there are comics you can't give away (I know, I've tried) Everyone may aspire to an ASM No1 but not everyone is desperate for a tatty Gunsmoke Western even if it is from 1961. And he probably isn't even referring to Marvel comics. The total number of Dell UK price variant collectors on the planet (also including Venus and Mars) amounts to one person. Depends which side of the pond you're on as to what is real and what isn't