Albert Tatlock

On 2/28/2024 at 6:25 PM, themagicrobot said:

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.

Some people clearly live in hope.

For example, here are the current listings of a seller on ebay, 

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_ssn=sher8648&store_name=cultcomicbooksinternational&_oac=1&_trksid=p4429486.m3561.l2562

202 listings, well over 100 'key issues'.

Can't spot quite as many as that, myself, though.

On 2/28/2024 at 5:36 PM, Malacoda said:

Rightly so.  Though removing the lion from Tate & Lyle seem a bit nuts.to me.  How many lions actually wrote in, do you think? 

Maybe they were having a paws for thought.

And the PC brigade decided to lean on Camp coffee, too.

Out goes the old oppressive colonial trope at top, in comes the more progressive and enlightened one at bottom.

You can be as Camp as you like these days, they can't touch you for it.

On 2/28/2024 at 4:39 PM, Malacoda said:

Though it does make it the cheapest comic in the spinner and you could spend the extra penny on some Fruit Salads and Blackjacks. 

Yep, remember 'em well.

Selling them these days would get you 6 months, though.

On 2/27/2024 at 6:16 PM, themagicrobot said:

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? 

If the comics were never meant to be sold in the expired currency they were priced in, it hardly matters how slipshod the application was.

I am still sticking to my guns and believe that the diamond stamps were the last rites, the final nail in their coffin, and represent the end of the road for their SOR status.

Whoever had bought them, presumably at a hefty discount, hoped to sell enough of them to recoup the outlay before disposing of them to a waste paper merchant.

Not sure if this sticker has turned up before.

10d to 9d is a trifling discount, hardly likely to sway a prospective purchaser to put hand to pocket.

And the one the guy is reading is still priced at the full 12 cents. which seems to have annoyed the creature.

Another unsold and repriced Kid.

And a different (to me, anyway) PBS stamp.

How unusual is it?

On 2/20/2024 at 5:46 PM, baggsey said:

How about comics destined for Ireland? According to Wikipedia, although Eire decimalized along with the UK in 1971, the old shilling coin was kept in circulation until 1993.  @Malacoda - did T&P have a distribution centre in Ireland. If we have any Irish lurkers on this forum, perhaps they can confirm if the stamp is familiar?

Our shillings here in Blighty also continued in circulation until 1990, and the old 2 bob lingered until 1992. They circulated alongside the new 5 and 10 pence coins until they were withdrawn.

So they could be spent throughout the 1970s and 1980s, although the goods they could buy were priced in decimal currency.

Probably the Irish coinage followed the same pattern.

Any of T & P's stock headed across the Irish Sea would have been stamped or stickered with a decimal price, I am sure.

Here is how Pat, Mick or Seamus, or indeed Fred, Bert or Alf, would have paid for his fix.

On 2/20/2024 at 8:59 AM, Mr Thorpe said:

Those '5's haven't come out so well above.

Here they are in their full cover glory!

Some of these appear to be in pretty decent shape, but all of mine had been in the wars (a long drawn-out series of war of attrition) by the time I came across them.

On 2/18/2024 at 10:22 PM, Malacoda said:

Indeed, though it raises the question of whether it was a re-saler, a wholesaler or a retailer.  The amount of these is so small and so spread out over time, it could be a retailer.  To this day, I still see stickers from pretty much every shop I bought from 40 years ago (including DTW, LTS, FP, Comics Showcase and just the other day a stack of Defenders from Books Bits & Bobs in Kingston). (Upon Thames). 

If a retailer, would they not bear the stamp or sticker of that outlet, even if clearly second-hand?

My guess is that they were bought up as a cheap job lot, then sold on to market traders and the like.

That there was still a bit of mileage in them is evidenced by this one a couple of pages back with a PBS stamp, plus the Hot Wheels one at the top of this page..

On 2/18/2024 at 5:32 PM, Malacoda said:

@Albert Tatlock  To your point about the purpose of the diamond stamp, this is a 2/- comic that was actually stamped 2/- at the time, so stamping it with 2/- again was completely redundant unless the stamp was serving some other purpose.  Also (1)  the fact that it was stamped 2/- by T&P means it was stamped at the time (2) the fact that it's Marvel means it was almost certainly shipped at the point of production not some unspecified time later and (3) the T&P stamp looks distinctly faded to me which means either Ethel needed to hit the pad again or, equally possibly, it had already spent some time out in the world.  So maybe a return that was sold on and had to be re-stamped because the T&P price wasn't the official stamp of whoever was re-retailing it. 

 

 

 

But we do not know on which date the diamond stamp was applied. Not close to the original date when it was stamped by T & P. I reckon.

Many of the other diamond stamps are on post-decimal examples, so my guess is that this one had been remaindered for a few years when it was taken up by the mystery buyer who also bought a whole batch of other out of date stuff.

On 2/13/2024 at 11:21 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Cannot see rest of this chart, do you reckon you could post it all, so we know which of the little blighters are still dodging us.

On 2/13/2024 at 11:21 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Where did you find it Albert - is it your copy or did you spot it online?

It is mine now, all mine d'you hear, and will be treasured forever. It turned up in a bundle of nondescript stuff that has only just reached me.

I said a while back that I had never come across this title (Flippity) or  Porkchops. If I had I would just have riffled past in search of something more to my liking. My early collecting activity was quite narrowly focused.

Then I took to thinking that Peter Porkchops sounded familiar, and just about convinced myself that I had seen one.

But now  I have come to the conclusion that I must have been fondly remembering the character as depicted in the in -house ads, as shown below.

So the search goes on.

On 2/14/2024 at 4:48 PM, baggsey said:

I still live in hope that a T&P stamped copy of Detective 272 turns up. As I previously related, I did have a copy back in the 70's. It had a tear in the cover and a taped spine, according to my notes.

Quite likely that at least one will turn up, ditto Adventure # 265, which I had in the mid 1960s.

Probably the best candidate for next earliest stamped copy to come to light is Unexpected # 43.

On 2/13/2024 at 10:14 PM, OtherEric said:

 

Just remember:  saying you never expect something to turn up is the most effective way of making something actually turn up, but it only works if you absolutely and sincerely believe that it won’t ever turn up when you say it.

When blizzards sweep through Hell...............

On 2/13/2024 at 12:41 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

Gap aside, that cover date is still within the first 4 stamp cycles, so it may yet turn up. We just need one US unsold stray to find its way into the mix.....

If only, but..............

On 2/11/2024 at 12:24 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

I was watching this book on the bay but forgot to bid. Busy day, yesterday. It has quite an unusual repricing situation going on:

It only went for a few Alans in the end. Probably a fun read too. I like how he describes the cover scenario so literally.

Imagine if he described the distribution marks.

"Huh? A Thorpe & Porter stamped copy with a load of ink smudging out the 9d price only for the book to then be restamped with an unbranded 10d stamp of a variety seldom seen!"

No cause for concern here, Blackhawk  has previous experience to draw on.

It's deja vu all over again.

And both times he's lost his hat.

On 2/10/2024 at 3:47 PM, Nick Furious said:

Tales to Astonish 13 was just another Tales to Astonish comic until Guardians of the Galaxy.  And then it became the first appearance of Groot...a character of significance, giving the book historical significance. 

At the time TTA # 13 was published, Groot was a character of no significance.

The same as TTA # 27.

What if the first Ant Man appearance had featured a different scientist, not Henry Pym, but with roughly the same powers?

Then TTA # 27 would be worth the same today as # 26 and # 28.

The subject under discussion here has more to do with human psychology than the comic book industry.

Why pay many times more for issue A of a title than issue B, when both are circulating in equal quantities?

FOMO has not yet been mentioned, but it is surely a driver. 

On 2/6/2024 at 11:59 PM, Redshade said:

I have never seen this periodical before Albert. The only name that I recognise apart from Denis Gifford is Steve Holland, although it gives an idea of where B Whitworth was coming from (and I don't mean Lancashire). I wonder what The Showroom was?

Here are a couple of pictures of the old and the new wings of the Showroom.

Probably.

On 2/6/2024 at 11:26 PM, Redshade said:

". . .  and no sales he would soon go bust.".

I think that the enterprise was more of a side-line than a steady flow of income.

"And where did he stand legally, especially copying Superadventure/Superboy/Superman comics".

Notice that he always copied reprint comics  rather than directly from DC issues. Even so I would imagine that he wouldn't have had a leg to stand on from a legal point of view.

From an old copy of ICJ.

Bryon is circulating his readership in an attempt to gather material to reproduce, it seems.

£4 to borrow each item of interest. I am not sure how many he would need to sell to break even, not a lot, I  suppose.

More of a hobby than a business, I reckon.

There are some strange things happening here.

Consider the case of Tales To Astonish # 13.

Before the release of Guardians Of The Galaxy, # 13 was worth exactly the same as # 12 and #14.

That changed almost overnight. Who decided that # 13 should go up in value? The story is a run-of the mill Lee/Kirby pre-superhero, Groot is a very minor character, and the supply is not out of line with the others of the period.

What made fans decide that they could no longer live without a copy of TTA# 13?

And who took advantage of it?

As previously mentioned, greed and speculation are an intrinsic part of the dynamic here.

Any way of finding out whether anyone involved in the production of GOTG hoarded TTA # 13?

If not, they must be kicking themselves.

On 1/31/2024 at 3:00 PM, Malacoda said:

You were saying 60's and early 70's above, but Titan would put us in the 80's? 

I was in the Corn Exchange in the '80s.

The chances of picking up a bargain at a street market had fizzled out by then. The reference to the 60s and 70s were when it was still possible to unearth, say FF # 1-10 and early Spider-Man, etc, but by the 80s those days were just about over, although there was still fairly recent stuff (say 5 to 10 years old) that could be sold on.

When Frank Dobson's Fantasy Advertiser started to be widely read, say 1967 onwards, the second-hand sources began to dry up, as dealers were buying up everything of value and issuing lists. Even new comics which were in short supply on the newsstands would reappear in FA at a hefty mark-up. Frank typically charged 3/6d for Marvels just a few months old.

Still, if you kept your eyes open, it was possible that a one owner collection would suddenly appear on a local market, but you had to be quick off the mark.

On 1/31/2024 at 2:21 PM, Malacoda said:

This explains why T&P were in there.  Their storage seems to be a mix of large outer-city warehouses and depots with smaller units, lock ups, garages, rooms above shops etc in the inner cities where all the newsagents were.  A spacious, cheap rent, dry, easy access, inner-city storage area would have ticked every box for them. 

But parking was a problem. No dedicated loading bay, yellow peril on prowl, pencil poised.

You had to be quick in and quick out, not easy if you had any quantity of stock to load/unload.

I got around it by arriving at crack of dawn, before restrictions kicked in.

I think the comic shop concentrated on imports, probably from Titan. No back issues, I seem to remember, so not on my regular search list.