themagicrobot

Who knows? I was told " this one is just to show off horses " even though I posted a comic cover with a huge horse head on it. So no doubt this Lois Lane will be frowned on. They should be glad anyone is still bothering to visit/post in these forums.............

Here is a May 1976 Marvel comic compared to an IW comic which is pretty well “Golden Age" sized. Dells in the 1960s we’re always wider than Marvels and DCs too. Here is a May 1975 Marvel comic. Behind it is a Thor 167 from 1969 which is obviously wider. Here is a recent She-Hulk. Behind it is a Marvel comics Kull 18 from 1976 which is possibly 1mm wider but there is very little difference between the two comics. Here is the Captain Marvel 38 from 1975 placed behind a new comic. It is the same width as the brand new She-Hulk at the bottom but slightly wider at the top. Printing techniques 50 years ago weren't state of the art as they are today and there were obvious subtle variations depending how squarely the cover was affixed etc etc. But in conclusion that mid 1970s Marvel fits into a modern bag.

If Rodolphe Töpffer comics are scarce, then Romeo (1957 - 1974) can't be far behind. Girls in that time period had weekly comics delivered just like boys did but they never ever saved their comics. The girl next door used to pass me her issues of Lady Penelope (and I still have a handful to this day) as I liked the Monkees and Bewitched strips. But she wasn't interested in my Smash! Romeos are as rare as Rocking Horse droppings. It seems that Romeo, right from its earliest days, featured reprints of Millie the Model strips (and possibly other similar US material). I can't think of any other D.C. Thompson comic reprinting any other Marvel (or DC/Dell etc for that matter) material in their numerous publications. After the demise of Miller, surely they missed a trick. In some alternate universe the Hulk could have featured alongside the Bash Street Kids in the Beano.

RS has always stood for Rallye Sport to me. If my brother had kept his 1979 Ford Escort Mk11 RS2000 until today he could now sell it and have enough money to buy an AF15. I am in the process of selling a 1967 Triumph Herald. With the proceeds I will be able to buy either this Gold Key comic or this Marvel comic (but not both).

I like a good mystery. Postman Pat hasn't delivered it yet though. There are three known different US cents priced versions of this comic. This is version four. Was this comic printed entirely in the UK, or, as seems more likely is it a UK variant with just a different cover around the interior pages??

The thriller I never expected to see! I never expected to see Ms van Dyne fly THROUGH the zero of the 10d price stamp.

you missed a bit

I suppose they think everyone (ie: crazy people younger than ourselves) don't actually know what comics they wish to purchase but they know they must get "key issues" so that is the search term they use rather than an issue number. What about these currently for sale?!?

In the summer of 1967 I spent a week of the summer holidays at an Aunts. The newsagents round the corner had a spinner rack crammed with the Man/Male/Magazines so popular at the time. Just the bottom two rows contained comics and I kid you not EVERY comic was a Tower comic. This was a surprise to me as up until that point I had never heard of Tower comics. The other surprising thing was that there were issues of T.H.U.N.D.E.R Agents spanning many months. All pristine and newly-delivered it seemed. Somehow I found enough money to go each day to buy one or two of these mysterious exotic comics and by the end of the week I had numbers 6 to 10 and a few No Mans and Dynamos. Each issue cost a staggering 1/6. I never saw any stamped at 10d. And back home I never saw any more Tower comics for a couple of years. It's funny what you remember isn't it. It's also funny peculiar that people are currently selling (or perhaps that should be trying to sell) poor condition stuff like this for £10 - £15. I've thrown better stuff in the bin.

The Diamond stamps are a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. I can understand a 1971 Giant being stamped with the old £sd coinage of 2 Shillings as Decimalisation was still new and a novelty then. (Beginning in 1971 my local Grocers (we didn't have a supermarket until the 1990s) displayed dual prices until 1974. He featured in the local newspaper threatening to only accept the old "real" currency). But I can't understand why a 1973/1974 20 cent comic would be stamped with the rather expensive 2/- price when even new (and not sale price) it should have cost 7 or 8 Englandville pees, (explaining here that 2/- = 10p for any Martians reading this). PS: Have you noticed how poorly the Diamond stamps are executed. After years of practice/tedium, Gladys had perfected a clear stamp with the price (usually) the right way up and (usually) to the top right of a comic. The Diamond stamps appear randomly across covers and often upside down. Perhaps they were done by a trainee or the warehouse cat?

The sturdy UK Annuals will survive long after all the UK newsprint comics have crumbled away. There is a bewildering array of Annuals covering everything/everyone you can think of as well as the Marvel ones. Often the Annuals contain what our Annualless (is that a word?) friends in the US would call "neat stuff".

Yikes! @Malacoda What are you doing to me. I have all those. Apart from the Hulk Annual. Now I’m going to have to look for that too.

Yes that was me. I bought every single one of those. Apart from Amazing Adventures. Never saw that. Now I’m going to have to go and look for one ….

I think the problems have been pointed out above. Unless you have a friend or relative in the US prepared to pay for things on your behalf then paying for stuff to be delivered to a different address than your own would throw up red flags for sellers. Parcels crossing the Atlantic ocean will always be costly. Most people, even buying from their own country have to add the cost of packing and postage to the price they are paying for a comic and decide if it is still a good deal. Paris has comic shops but if it is back issues you seek have you purchased much from the UK? a 2KG (for example) parcel from the UK to Switzerland costs between £7 and as low as £2 depending if you want it tracked/signed for and how quickly you need it delivering. https://www.royalmail.com/sending/international/country-guides/switzerland

Gold Star appear to have distributed Skywald and Eerie Publications magazines in the UK. Young Donna was given UK price stickers to apply to the gruesome covers (porn) and the Horror mags too. And it is possible that Gold brought in some Warrens at some point. They had a working relationship and produced their own version of Eerie for a time. Perhaps later on the same people that distributed the Marvel/Curtis magazines (Comag?) were involved with Warrens. They always appeared together at my friendly neighbourhood newsagents in the 1970s. But the Marvels usually had UK price stickers and the (Warren) Eeries didn't so how did I know what to pay? They only displayed dual prices for a short while. This is a Warren Eerie This isn't a Warren Eerie Then again here is a Weird with a T&P ink stamp. And I can't make out what this 3/- stamp says.

As a little kid I collected stamps before I had any disposable income to buy (and collect) comics. As family members worked in offices they would bring me hundreds of stamps ripped off envelopes and parcels. The UK had a mind boggling amount of special stamps. I still have the album full of worthless but colourful bits of paper. Then I had a phase collecting matchboxes then bubblegum (trading) cards. Later it was singles and LPs. Now it is motorbikes. But the younger generations never seemed to be bitten by the collection bug and most are happy with a minimalist lifestyle. I'd buy a 45rpm record because I wanted to own it to listen to it when I wanted. It may/may not ever have been played again on the radio whilst I was listening. If I didn't grab that current Action comics while it was new on the spinner rack I might never see another copy. Before VHS even watching Batman on TV was something you needed to do as it may/may not have been repeated again. That urgency to own stuff is unnecessary when everything new or old is available as a digital download. There will be certain comics that always have value but I can't see much future for run-of-the mill 1950s comics. In another decade who will want old Charltons or Dells or even New52 DCs? I hope I'm wrong. I've never ever purchased any stamps for money but these look interesting......

Thorpe and Porter distributed Warren's Famous Monsters of Filmland from the beginning. But (asking for a friend) who brought Creepy and Eerie to the UK??? You would have assumed The-Company-Once-Owned-By-Fred, at least in the 1960s, along with the FMOFs. I have a hundred Eeries and more Vampirellas than are sensible. Not one of them display an inky Gladys-style price stamp. And then, like Buses, these two (well four actually) come along.

What are we to make of these two comics. One has the 2/- stamp (but no 10d one as is often the case) and one has a 5p sticker. Both comics must have been lying around for years (or come back as returns) before returning to circulation.

I suppose it could be possible that the diamond stamped comics were destined for Ireland. We've seen earlier in this thread Irish comics ink stamp priced at 1/- that were still 10d in the UK. A quick look at ebay.ie doesn't reveal any diamond stamps though but there is a batch of mid 1970s comics with different 10p stamps which interestingly means by then their comics were the same price as ours. I still favour the theory that the diamond stamps were applied to a random batch of (mostly very ) old comics when Gladys decided to sweep up under the benches.

Dunno why I'm bothering Dept: But here goes. IW Comics have one thing going for them. Most issues displayed brand new covers. Here is a Morse Horse (and the Kid) looking right at YOU and apparently drawn by John Severin. The cover is improved further by Len's ink stamp. So if the UK newsagent was selling this comic for 6d (and there needed to be a profit in it for him) what price was Len wholesaling them out at?!? And what price was Len BUYING them at?!? A penny each??

This is the Bronze Age thread so I guess Conan was the first in the Bronze Age But for first ever my vote would go to Miss Fury. She was originally in newspaper strips and Timley reprinted some Sunday strips from 1942 onwards.

Mr Google says: During 1945, King Features Syndicate attempted to distribute Jane in the United States. However, the nudity was too much for prudish American audiences, and the attempt ceased during 1946. I'm sure there were others before and since.

In this age of supposed "inclusivity" why discriminate against Martians and Robots? My favourite robot is this one with his rocket launcher situated rather inappropriately.

It can't just have been a one way street. If we were getting your comic strips like the Katzenjammer Kids in our newspapers 100 years ago, surely, due to the insatiable demand for material, the chances are some of our strips would have been sold to your syndicates. So as well as newspapers, perhaps one or two UK comic strips may have appeared in some early 1930s "comics"? Ally Sloper is claimed to be the first comic character back in the Victorian period. Perhaps he crossed the Atlantic? Or not.

OK Will do.