themagicrobot

On a lighter note here is a Quistmas Quiz. Which comic cover featured Lois reading an issue of Amazing Spidey-Man? All issues of this series are comparative bargains compared to the overpriced tat from the same period currently for sale.

So the earlier Black Magic Album sold for £9.99. Some may say that was a bargain. I didn't bid but that's about as much as I would have paid so I won't be bidding on this one.

Ethel did have at least one helpmate. Was it Gladys or Enid? Or were there a whole team of stamperers? Two Superboy 164s. One has a T&P stamp. The other appears to have a T3P stamp seen more clearly on another April 1970 DC.

The US edition of this book sold 600,000 copies it seems. Mr Keel is best known for the Mothman Prophecies though. The original book had Al Jaffee artwork on the cover so I assume the interior artwork was his too? This UK edition, also from 1966 has a particularly odd cover. "Camp" seems to have been all the rage in the mid 1960s

Legendary Ditko panels? Not these. I'm sure you mean these, and the dramatic full page image that follows.

And of course stickers were used for that period when having long ago stopped the Double Doubles they needed half price sales to clear the slow-moving returns.

Hey guys, look at all this cool stuff you can get mail-order. I'm sending off for a Skull Ring AND a trick Baseball. It's not like it matters cutting the cover of this modern comic. Its never going to be worth anything although I heard that Superman Number 1 from 30 years ago is fetching $10. $10 for an old comic book. That's crazy.

Probably that was the case. Along with two year old comics they found under a bench that got shipped out again repriced with the then-new decimal currency.

Why did T&P toy with stickers but return to ink stamps. A white sticker would show up better on dark coloured artwork than an ink stamp. A sticker could be placed in the same position on all comics rather than Ethel having to use her initiative to find a suitable spot for her ink stamp.

Isn't it all fast on its way to becoming a Ponzi Scheme? To date there are 4790 slabbed 1963 Amazing Spider-Man Number 1s listed. For a "valuable" comic it appears to be quite common. There must be raw copies out there too. However there are only 104 slabbed pence variants (and only 80 pence AF15s) and still some consider pence variants to be inferior. I'd think that they ought to be more valuable. PS: I find navigating the CGC Census quite difficult and there are loads of anomalies. Even tracking the 1963 Spidey 1 meant scrolling through loads of more recent totally different comics. And according to them there are two slabbed Alan Class Amazing Spider-Man Annual Number 1s (which were issued in 1900). What nonsense.

I always pictured a bored Ethel, ciggy in mouth, with a resemblance to Hilda Ogden, (Albert can explain that to Othereric) tearing off covers to assemble Double Doubles and taking home bundles of unwanted DC, ACG and the odd Marvel covers to paper the bedroom walls of her sprogs.

Were they maybe overprinted over here before UK distribution or were they just very good ink stamps? The positioning of this one is odd. And T&P ink stamped UK prices to Warren's Monster World and FMOF but never Eeries or Creepies. That is eerie and creepy. Have a cool yule. With a ghoul.

Donna didn't like getting ink stains on her fingers and asked Mr Gold to get her some stickers instead. She had noticed that the local new-fangled supermarket used stickers on tins of Heinz Beanz rather than messy ink stamps. So it was that Goldstar moved into the modern world with trendy swinging sixties orange labels. But who on earth stamped (or had printed) "UK Edition 2/6" on Fantastic Monsters ?

Are you positive it was Ethel who had the stamp upside down? After five or so years she was a most experienced stamperer. And didn't you earlier reliably assume that she lived in the Thurmaston area and worked for T&P? It is more likely that she was stamping oddities like this Dell and due to the rarity of 2/6 ink stamps others had to resort to stickers. Or was the magazine imported into the UK by more than one company?

RIP Mike. I first visited his site in the 1990s and his must have been one of the very first sites with A to Z INFO compared to the randomness of early blogs and the like that featured comics. It seems he may well have been as young as 49 which makes his passing all the sadder. And from a young age, unusually, he appears to have been fascinated by Golden Age comics, particularly DCs and set out to collect ALL DCs. He only needed another 1647 to achieve that goal. He did own every DC comic published between 1959 and 2010. A feat in itself. I like this article of his http://www.mikesamazingworld.com/main/index.php?page=fanboy&articleid=34 Where he explains something that puzzled me at the time:- This 3-month gap lasted well into the 1980s when the direct market began to take over the distribution of comics. Because of the delays between printing and distribution in the standard newsstand system vs. the faster turnaround time for distribution in the direct market, direct market retailers got their books 2-3 weeks before they showed up on the newsstand. For example a book like Superman #12 cover dated Dec 1987, was scheduled for newsstand distribution in September (9/8/87). A direct market retailer however was able to get the book quicker, so it went on sale in late August. This meant as much as a 4-month gap between release date and cover date in the direct market. In the direct market, retailers generally don't use the cover dates to determine when to remove books from the stands. Therefore having a 4-month gap must have seemed pretty ridiculous. In 1988, DC chose to implement a way to close that gap. 1988 actually has 14 different cover dates instead of 12. After the DEC cover dated books (released in August), DC used WINTER then HOLIDAY for the next two cover months. (Only about half the books actually printed the Winter or Holiday on the cover. Some were just left blank with no month.) DC then resumed with JAN 1989 cover dates released in November. Thus the 2-month gap that existed from 1940-1973 was re-established. DC maintains this 2-month gap between cover date and on sale date to this day.

I'm sorry I only own three before No 30 and I assume those cover images have already been posted. There is also Pep (1960 series) #151,153-156,158,160 and Laugh (1946 series) #128,129,132,134,136-139,143, which featured 6-page stories of the Fly and Fly Girl.

If something would only happen that would give me an idea of a witty response. Ah well, never mind. This one isn't boring as it has the much-coveted 4d ink stamp. And to quickly return to things Fly-related (slightly) was Jenson part of T&P so were they printing Alan's comics at this point in time?

Harvey Comics had a Bee Man (or was it B-Man?). Note the yellow box behind the Creepy Worlds logo. It isn't the same shape as the box on the original cover. Alan never did this again for any issue of Creepy Worlds. Perhaps the artwork supplied had the Fly Man logo attached and he had no choice. incidentally, this was the period (1970??) when I purchased Creepy Worlds new every month. There was a run of approx a whole year where Marvel characters appeared on the covers and inside. This made a change from the usual "boring" Charlton and ACG stuff that dominated the run earlier and later.

Written/drawn by Bob Rite whoever he may have been. Issued in 1966 to cash in on the craze for all Bat-related stuff at that time. Talking of cashing in on the Bat-craze of 1966 I purchased this cardboard "mask" back then. If it hadn't said "Batman" on the front I don't think anyone would have known what it was meant to be.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/nov/25/tv-tonight-david-tennant-and-catherine-tate-finally-reunite-in-the-tardis On the 23rd November 1963 I was sitting in a terraced house watching my grandparents rented black and white television. The sport and the news had just finished. I think previously on Saturdays we had watched the Lone Arranger. On this particular day a new series began that I only realised was a science fiction show halfway through. The electronic music was especially memorable and I didn't miss an episode for the next 10 years.

Did they use the cover image for the splash page or vice versa?

DC forgot to put the 10 cents price on the cover so T&P made up for it by giving us a choice of how much we paid for Bob Hope 60.

There are as many stamps and stickers as there are old comics. Not so much these days, sadly, since the invention of the bar code. I keep meaning, and forgetting, to find out more about the shortlived Australian Federal comics Finally completed this run of (six) magazines 5 minutes ago. The price when new of 20p seems cheap for a $1 comic. Today a $1 comic (if such a thing existed) would cost £1.

No just the stock images that come with the software. But NONE of my issues 31 - 50 have any stamps, nor do any currently for sale at UKs 'Bay as far as I can see.