themagicrobot

What about the other way round when Marvelman from Warrior gets placed in US comics or the whole Quality line or dozens more examples of comic strips from other countries that end up reprinted in comics in the States.

I was going to add something to the debate but the above just reminded me not to waste my time as there are far nicer places to visit on the Interweb than here.

THe AU copy looks better? Even with its cheap newsprint cover? Anyway it ISN'T an Australian copy. THIS is the Australian copy.

Decisions. Decisions. Now, which one should I buy If I'm buying CGC graded books as investments. A Batman 64 graded as a 3.5 for £339.99 or a Bizarro Batman 64 graded as a 3.0 for a more expensive £399.95? Note well that along with the different page count the Bizarro Batman 64 has had fairly obvious changes to the artwork compared to the original so how can the two items be considered one and the same?

The chap selling (lets hope no one takes the bait) the Mystic 40 for a mystical amount of money also seems to have cornered the market for "mis-labelled" reprint books. Even Alan Class ones as well as the K G Murray comics. But don't you think that as well as correcting the titles the CGC really need to give more accurate descriptions of the contents of comics in their slabs. Misleadingly they claim that the Batman 32 "contains World's Finest Comics 58 & Detective Comics 186" when it actually contains ONE STORY EACH from the three comics namechecked.

There seem to be numerous foreign reprint comics from a number of publishers where the same bonkers descriptions are used by the CGC. This can be problematical when an average low value reprint comic is labelled as if it were a "valuable" number 1 or key issue just because of the cover. But they aren't just doing it for "key issues" like the Groot example. The cover image appears to dictate the title at the top of the CGC slab. So unbelievably this Batman 73 becomes Detective 227 even though it obviously isn't. The interior is in black and white for a start. And it is unlikely both back up features within Detective 227 are included in this issue. It only contains 28 pages rather than 36 (although there are no interior ads unless they are on the inside front/back covers) And to add insult to injury the CGC describe this as an Australian comic when although Published by K G Murray more correctly it is a UK price variant of an Australian comic. It has a 6d price not a 9d price as found on the Australian copy. To begin with in the early 1950s these comics were printed by Gale and Polden in Aldershot UK. That company also produced books on the Military, postcards, cigarrette cards and numerous periodicals. The indicea on many 6d Batman and Superman copies I own says: Printed by Gale & Polden Ltd., for the K. G. Murray Publishing Co. Pty. Ltd., 56 Young Street, Sydney, Australia. Distributed by Atlas Publishing & Distributing co. Ltd., 18 Bride Lane, Fleet Street, London, E.C.4. I understand from down-under websites that at some point these comics began to be printed in Australia for both their comsumption and ours. Our copies shipped with changes in price and sometimes UK adverts on the back covers. Australian Batmans (and Superman/Superboy/Superadventure) were only 6d for the first few issues. The price soon increased to 8d and by the time this issue was on sale 9d was the going rate. Eventually these comics reached the price of 1/- in Australia whilst the UK variants remained at 6d from the beginning to the end of the run.

Looks like I'll have to start a thread called "Does Marvel have any Superhero titles". It would make about as much sense.

Frankly its hard to tell when people are taking the p*ss or not in the CGC forums. Read Alan's Swamp Thing, not just because it might possibly be considered a horror book but because its so very well written.

Then it's a joke I don't get. Are all threads here full of in-jokes that only the prolific posters get?? No wonder there is a large thread about lurkers.

Not sure why you think the pence comics posted at the start of this thread don't count? It's not like there weren't cents issues too.... And the majority of 1970s Black and White magazines from Warren, Skywald, Eerie Publications and yes.......Marvel/Curtis are most certainly classed as horror. Ralph Reese's Rats in Marvel's Haunt of Horror 1 scared the younger me.

Yes but where am I and new visitors supposed to easily find that updated list dated May 5th 2019? Have there been no new discoveries since then? I would guess new visitors wanting to comprehend what a UK price variant is would visit page one of this thread where different information displays. Websites/Blogs can have "stickies" of important information at the top. Here everything is buried among 100 pages and counting. Your chucking in a McGoohan didn't work for me as I thought it meant you were leaving this forum.

That sounds ominous. I was going to ask you if page one of this thread is still correct. I can't scroll through all those pages. I hate the quotes that reprint images again and make for such tedious scrolling. So I guess now we'll never know if this comic does or doesn't exist as a UK priced variant. Be seeing you

I honestly haven't a scooby but every Charlton comic and Magazine from late 1975 to mid 1976 has that same 0123456789 code (sometimes reversed) on them. Perhaps it took them 8 months to realize they werren't doing it right when a few shops finally installed scanners and asked them what was going on? See also that Marvel comics still displayed 1/- prices more than 6 months after we went to decimal currency. Human error?

Didn't you yourself post an image what was obviously a a sample/example of a barcode with consecutive numbers identical to the Charlton Yang one? A real barcode can't be 0123456789 (or even reversed) for every issue each month can it? A real barcode is 10 (sometimes 11 or 12 these days) assorted numbers. If you ever go to a shop and the package is crinkled and the code won't scan then the cashier can squint at the numbers the bars represent and manually type them in. No one rings or writes me either so I amused myself this afternoon by creating a giant T&P 9d in the back lawn with the mower until I was told to stop messing about.

So you still think Charlton comics dated October 1975 qualify as the first comics with barcodes even though they are pretend bar codes ? Action comics May 1976 has a code that retailers with the technology could actually scan through their cash registers.

Barcodes had been used in industry for a while when they first appeared in supermarkets in June 1974. 2000AD prog 633 Tharg proudly announced that the next issue(s) would contain a free barcode for every reader. That was as recently as 1989 here in UKville.

Remember this is Charlton you are talking about. Those barcodes on House of Yang issues from 1975 and 1976 don't look real as they have numbers 0 to 9 or 9 to 0 rather than a the expected10 digit code a scanner could read. I think "real" barcodes came later. But don't ask me to search for when/where..... Perhaps October 1976??

Can't recall the plot as I haven't read it since. The reason I remember the comic so specifically is that I was a big fan of Mike Grell artwork then and spent some of the holidays trying to copy his style for a (ultimately aborted) Fanzine that I and two friends were working on. The next year Motorbikes and Cars took up my spare cash and comics (apart from Warrens) began to take a back seat.

I used to keep a note of what comics I bought and when back in the day. Wish I'd kept that book now as it would have been useful for this thread. What I can say with confidence is that when I visited my local newsagents daily in the 1960s "new" DCs appearing on the spinner always had months-old dates. By the 1970s the months were pretty well in synch. I do recall coming home from College for Easter 1975 and buying this Superboy/Legion 207 (cover dated March 1975 but March/April inside) at the station and reading it on the train. Easter Sunday was March 30th that year. PS: And it seems quite a reasonable assumption that all those printed/not distributed comics as per the Statementof Ownership were ideal candidates to be sold onwards to the UK (and other countries too ?!?) Once they had figures of how many copies of a title were selling surely they would amend future production figures? The fact that they didn't showed they had a use for those extra copies.

The Grand Comic Database put this as being from 1945. It seems they were actually sold in the latter half of the 1950s. https://www.comics.org/issue/932986/ I guess a batch of covers were found (or reprinted) and paired with remaindered comics or coverless comics. Not really a legit thing to do? Good job the price hadn't changed for comics in a dozen years (although the page count reduced). See also Blue Circle Comics (and the trick would be repeated with multiple comics by Elisdons and Thorpe and Porter's Double Double comics and others)

I think Albert was using a technique we call "humour". We need more here and in current episodes of Coronation Street. All my comics aged 10 had a "subscription crease" as that was the only way they fitted into my back jeans pocket. I think Overstreet use the terminology for any comic with a fold in it. True that subscription comics were folded in the 1950s and 1960s which may explain why there were so few subscription comics sold compared to newsstand editions (when you look at those "statement of ownership " thingies). Mad Magazines purchased unseen second hand can have the odd problem of a double "subscription crease" just on the back cover due to Al Jafee's "Mad fold-in" found in most issues from the mid 1960s onwards. .

I thought the title of this thread was "oddly similar"?? Are you now policing what can be posted here? I give up.

As for the ND comics where odd copies were found in the UK (I'm sure I once owned a FF 80) what about the "ballast" theory? Certainly market stalls in London and Glasgow (I used to trade comics with someone from there in the late 60s/early 70s) had comics that hadn't arrived in the UK by the usual distributors. Not sure if everything in this link is correct but some interesting thoughts are made: https://g1rm.wordpress.com/2020/04/18/a-short-history-of-ballast-comics/

Perhaps it depended if Gladys or Ethel was doing the stamping. This comic is cover dated Dec 1970 and priced in sterling.