Pinkerton

Hi 01TheDude This is so kind of you to go to the trouble. Well, looking at the back cover (top right general area) one certainly cannot see an obvious reverse imprint right up in the top corner, but they were always going to be faint if visible at all. However, to take this chase as deep as possible into the rabbit hole, comparing the rear cover with others on MyComicShop listings, on your rear cover there appear to be flecks of darker material around the rifle-totin' cowboy - to the left of the head, above his hat, and to the right. Not only that, the flecks look kind of purple to me. Whereas on MCS rear covers the area is crisply printed and clear even on a FR copy. If these are carryover marks, why are they not aligned right to the top right corner? Well, if the books were hand-stamped in quantity one imagines that it would be stamp, toss into a pile, stamp, toss, and so on. It would take ages to stack them neatly while stamping. That would come later when you had a big pile done. The width and height of the stamp on your front cover (on my screen, not true dimensions) is 55mm x 22mm. Looking at the back cover, all the purplish flecks starting from to the left of the cowboy's head to the last clear ones above the left hand edge of the other cowboy's hat lie within a box with those dimensions. Again, suggestive. Of course it's entirely possible, and even probable, that the marks seen on your rear cover scan are just regular dirt, but looking at the rest of the cover it looks pretty clean, so circumstantially the fact that these purplish marks are the only ones on the cover, and concentrated not far away from where they might be expected, and of the right extent, allows another bent toothpick to be added to support the tottering edifice of post-printing test price marketing. Or as Marwood said, just a drugstore jacking up his prices to make a nice profit once all the other books he had for sale were 12c - and two of them miraculously survived out of a small batch of a huge number distributed. Those kind of miracles do happen. Thanks again for doing this. Stories like this are keeping me sane. Or are they? Geoff

If there had been only one JIM #75 example (and I can only find one, so you are better at searching than I am) I could easily mark it down as what you suggest - a freak survivor from one locality or even one drugstore, no more significant than a date arrival stamp. Perhaps rather than test-marketing, a bundle of them had got accidentally left in a corner instead of making it to the spinner racks, and by the time they were discovered JIM #76 was already on sale on the racks at 12c. Two cents up from 10c is a huge hike and well worth having for the retailer (particularly as you had paid less for them than for your #76 copies), and maybe the same corner store were used to making their own little pricing stamps for all sorts of small retailer reasons. But to see two examples? At a rough guess, maybe 100,000-200,000 copies were bought. I've seen one example out of only a dozen on Google images - that suggests a possible 10,000 copies with the overprint, but of course it could be a genuinely very random survival of one of perhaps a dozen copies, and a sample number of one really only shows that that one copy exists, not much more. But with two examples? Suddenly for both to survive out of a small pile is extremely unlikely, and Occam's razor requires that we consider the likelihood that there were indeed several thousand copies in circulation, which could only have been done at distributor level. Hence test marketing? To find another example of a similar treatment with any other book (or publisher) around that time would be illuminating. As it is, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. As I understand it the DC titles (and other publishers) were also transiting from 10c to 12c. Incidentally where did you find the other stamped JIM #75 (this is a sly way of asking where else one might search for such things!). BW, Geoff

Hi Marwood For this kind of hypothetical manual overprinting to work, the area close to the 10c price has to be light-coloured (as in JIM #75). Looking at some other Dec 10c titles they often have very dark surrounds, so overprinting would be useless? They would have to choose a book with a light surrounding area, perhaps they even selected that light grey in order that it could be overprinted? Geoff

Yes the one I found was on page 299 of CGC Forum Show Us Your 10-Cent-ers, posted by Frisco Larson Geoff

This (JIM #75) is the oddest thing I have seen, in an admittedly extremely short exposure to 1950s cover variants. It comes a month before the other black circle variants which cannot possibly be a coincidence - it has to be part of the price switchover - but as pointed out elsewhere, over a publication month, arrival and printing of the Atlas titles would be spread over days or even over the whole month depending on what was ready to go and what was delayed. It seems clear that the three genuine black circle variants including JIM #76 were exactly in the changeover spot, between the pukka 10c prices and the new 12c prices. So JIM #75 would have to have been printed way before the start of the changeover, and should have been out of the door and on newsstands with 10c prices. The "overprinting" does indeed have a kind of "hand-stamped rubber block" look, as if someone had a manual rubber stamp made up. The choice of ink colour (not black, but a purple colour) again suggests someone just reached for whatever came with the stamp kit, when black would have been more sensible. Then there's the issue Marwood points out that the 12c "overprint" actually resembles an underprint. I can't get my head around that at all in terms of process printing, so I suggest that these price corrections were done after the original covers were printed and not part of the usual process printing. The combination of the well-dried glossy covers and the amateur hand-stamping with a rubber stamp and "domestic ink" perhaps resulted in a poor takeup of the ink over the glossy red "JO" letters, giving the impression on a digital image that the hand-stamp lies underneath. The coverage of the 10c price is poor too. Without being able to examine the physical covers it is hard to say whether it really is underprinted. Also it would be good to see the back covers as well - if they were done by hand from a big pile of stapled books, one may be able to see the damp ink of one copy on the back cover of another? That would never happen during process printing. Maybe, just maybe, Atlas knew they wanted to try for a cover price increase in the near future and wanted to do a price test, as carried out famously much later on with 30c/35c and so on. So perhaps JIM #75 was chosen (after the 10c covers had been printed and possibly even after they had left Sparta) for a short run of manually-overprinted 12c covers to be used in test marketing. Maybe 1-2% of the stapled books were set aside, someone given the job of overprinting and they were then shipped to selected newsstands for the test, with instructions to the outlet owners to get feedback. If so, the person doing the stamping probably had nightmares about Lo-Karr for some considerable time afterwards... All this assumes that they would get feedback within say 2-3 weeks as to whether the price hike was commercial suicide or not. In the meantime most of the issues for the next month had to run through the presses with 10c prices, but during the course of printing the three black circle covers, word arrived that the JIM #75 test marketing had been successful, so the black circle overprinting was carried out at Sparta. It's a ramshackle theory but if it might be true, it makes these apparently rare JIM #57s the unique forerunners of all Atlas 12c books - Pre-Black Circle Price Variants. Purple Box Variants anyone? I could only find one image looking through Google images but I expect there are other places to look. Best wishes, Geoff

Fine by me Redshade but it sounds as though it has moved on. I am sure that eventually the issue will rise high enough in the GCD hierarchy such that a correction will be made which gives the appropriate designations to all price variants, pence or whatever. What may prove a difficulty is not of will but of the underlying database software which GCD uses, but who knows. According to Wikipedia it is all volunteer-led in which case they may be reluctant to charge in with DB-wide alterations. The will will have to be there in the GCD board, and key people will be the Technical Coordinator (oversees the technical work on the site and coordinates it with the non-technical aspects of the project) and the Rules Coordinators (manage the process by which data entry and formatting rules are established) - again according to Wikipedia..

Possibly they had printed all the cents copies and even thrown the four plates in the bin (if that's what they do) when someone realised they had forgotten to run the pence copies. The foreman had gone off sick and the assistant had forgotten to stop the press and change the black plate. It was too late to print a new batch even if they had a fifth pence K plate, as they no longer had the three colour plates to work from (or perhaps one of the colour plates had got damaged and was unusable?). Anyway, the quick and dirty answer since they had a massive pile of cents covers and only needed a short run of pence covers was to go down to the far end of the press where all the cents covers were stacked, barrow back 25,000 (or whatever), quickly create a new black plate with just two elements - the oblong black overprint to hide the cents price, and a black pence price close by which could be reliably placed on a light area of the cover - then send the covers through again with fingers crossed. Another possibility in a huge printing factory is that they might have had a much simpler, cheaper "overprinter" which they used purely for overprinting a single colour, such as black, onto already-printed material? Then the huge and expensive four-colour offset machines would not be tied up with a relatively simple disaster recovery job. I have no idea whether they did have such things but in a huge factory like World Color they must surely have had such capacity. In the two examples above (admittedly two years apart) the pence prices are completely different in appearance, strongly suggesting that this was a rapid fix to get out of a hole and the last thing they would think about was consistency - the covers were already late! I can imagine the foreman screaming to get the plate in the press! Another thing, which also refers back to the Black Circle variants, is that the black overprinted pence prices are as close to the blackout area as practicable and still be on a light-coloured part of the cover - this might help to get the registration of the overprinting onto the already-printed cover good enough - must have been something of a nightmare. The machines are set up to print covers from the four rollers sequentially with extremely close tolerances, but re-feeding in a stack of covers and getting the overprints in just the right place may have been a bit tricky, particlarly if it was done on a different machine. But the corrected covers were acceptable, which was all that mattered, and it got the books out of the door. That's how I see it anyway. Once again, this may well have been laid out many times in many other threads - I just enjoy the speculation. I know this was in the 1970s, but I assume that they did exactly the same thing in the early 60s for the Black Circle variants. The covers were already half printed and stacked - and this isn't just a petty pence run but maybe 150,000 or more of each title which are going to be dumped - inconceivable. So again, they made a very simple black plate and overprinted all the already printed covers. The same constraints applied - the 12c price had to be darned close to the black circle, but in a light part of the cover, to minimise the risk of getting out of register. In fact if you squint at several Black Circle JIM #76s you can see that the position of the "12c" overprint is a bit variable - a bit to the left, a bit to the right, so the lineup to the already-printed covers was not as reproducible as the pukka four-roller cover printing. In those three cases, as far as I can see the cents fonts are identical, suggesting those three new black plates were set up by the same person or team at the same time, or within days of each other. The covers may even have been being printed together on the same large sheets (like in that 1970s video from Sparta where the Marvel and DC covers were on the same sheets before guillotining). That would certainly explain how all three got caught by the same problem? They were indeed half-way through all three - in the same print run! Well it's an idea. Once again, thanks for putting up this fascinating material.

Don't worry I will. My most recent exchange was with GCD over submission of pence covers (I had a few Bronze Marvels they didn't have). I uploaded about 20 over a few days, insisting on calling them all "UK Price Variants" instead of just "British" which they prefer - as you know from your own experience. After a day or two I got a message to say that could I please re-edit them all to be "British", sending links for the purpose. I replied to say that, as far as Overstreet and CGC were concerned, it was more correct to refer to them the way I had done so, and I very politely suggested that they might carry out a global find-and-replace on all their "British" editions, so that they could be facing the same way. They declined. I also pointed out that the linked pages they sent me to carry out the re-edits were indecipherable for this purpose, so they said they would do it. I have to say this was a rare piece of frustration with GCD. I have used it hundreds of times during my "comics reawakening" over the last couple of years and in general I love it. I guess running it is a largely thankless task and I'm assuming all the people doing routine approvals are volunteers.

I did finish reading this very intriguing thread and am very pleased also to see that it featured in Overstreet #49. Darn right. As for many issues you are hoping for the Spartan in his 90s to wander along and say how and why things were done as they were. It's presumably an area where simplicity, speed and economics would have been the drivers. Also it represents the early months of dual-price printing during which (as the numerous changes to indicia show) things were far from sorted out, and were being made up month to month. I hope that someone (CGC perhaps) will provide some further information, even if it is to confirm that the explanation is ridiculous or mundane. A couple of questions remain in my mind which I can't help feeling might be relevant. These are based entirely on your spreadsheet images, but I can only go by the sections you have provided. Also your complete sheet may have extra data now. After all absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as your great work on the 3000+ pence copies shows so well. 1 Why is there never any variation in the font of the pence copy prices – always tall. No matter which title or issue number it is, and despite the variable cents fonts, they are always the same, within this time window (I think). This should be telling us something, but what? 2 Why are there several JIM pence/cents issues (59, 62-65) which do not have "traditional" bold cents fonts, only variant ones? Are there others too? I can understand varying a procedure for all titles within a time window, but not for all issues of just one title. That suggests there is some reason why JIM was being processed differently from the other titles, which makes little sense. But you have pointed out numerous times that JIM seems to buck trends. No reply necessary unless someone has more information which may be relevant!

And you have fulfilled that original ambition superbly. Forgive me if I verbosely chewed over stuff that is new to me but very much old hat to those who have been writing and researching these topics for years - like you I enjoy trying to figure out how or why something came out on the page like that. It is not for me an issue about which was printed first (like you I suspect it varied wildly), but more trying to solve a puzzle. Currently I am half way through your Price Font thread and it is fascinating, because the crumbs of evidence are there for all to see, but... how did they get there, and why? Particularly that cowboy issue with three different cents fonts as well as the pence one. Geoff

I should have mentioned that the actual "real" monthly Marvels we had collected in Blackburn and Bedford were carefully boxed up by me before I went on the course. The UK comics were treasure but the monthly US Marvels were far more valuable even than that to all of us kids, so no chances taken there. I still can't believe that I didn't think to take the same trouble with the UK weeklies.

HI Marwood, just some thoughts on the Journey into Mystery #77 and #80 that you put up - for which many thanks, it's quite interesting. I have to take this in easy stages to reduce the chance of logical error. Firstly, the cover prices are different obviously. This would require either two black K plates (one for cents and one for pence), or a quick and dirty way of replacing the 12c circle text with the 9d circle text, which for all I know is perfectly possible. Does anyone know whether they made two plates or scraped off the 12c and tacked on the 9d? The discussion below doesn't make any assumptions either way as it refers only to the colour plates and how they created the issue number and month lettering - but I would be interested to know about the price number on the K plate as a side issue. I'm sure it has been covered elsewhere in this thread? Perhaps in the price font discussions, which I must dig back into. So, for the cents copies, both have the issue number as "reversed-out" white digits on the coloured JIM logo banner. This is created solely by the colour plates and the K plates have no part in it. Remembering what I read about printing, we have our four CMYK plates - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (Key, K). To print the issue numbers like that, there had to be NO ink on any of the four plates in the exact area occupied by the digits - in other words the digits were not printed at all, but were reversed out, not printed, leaving the white paper stock still white. You cannot print white on top of anything as there is no such thing as white ink printing, at least not with this technology. The surrounding logo banner area was of course picking up ink from very probably all three of the colour plates, but in the area of the issue number digits, the colour plates and the K plate had all been etched away during their production. Continuing thinking about the cents copies (we'll get to the pence copies later), the simplest way to do the month lettering would be to do it exactly the same way as the issue digits - reversed out with the lettering etched away on all four plates, so no ink from any plate in that area - result is white cover stock visible, to make the lettering. So the question you obviously raised is - why didn't they do it that way for both issue number digits and month letters? And how does the need to modify the printing to make the pence cover inform this? So, the only difference between the cents and pence copies is in the month lettering. For the cents copies, they needed lettering of some visible kind, but as the lettering is reversed out it couldn't be on the K plate, which leaves creating it on the colour plates. For the pence copies, they wanted no lettering visible (because of the shipping delays), but they didn't mind having an empty lozenge there - who cares, it's only kids' comics. So, if they started with the cents plates, IF they etched all four plates as per the issue number, they would have no trouble printing the cents month as "white on colour" (actually no ink at all, like the issue number), but when it came to the pence copies they would have had to scrape off all the surrounding area from all three colour plates - looking at the banner colour that would have been all three plates that needed scraping, which would finally give an empty white lozenge. They could have done that, but they didn't. Why? Well, it would have been a tricky process if they wanted to leave a blank white area - they would have had to scrape away to the exact lozenge shape on all three colour plates in order to get a clean white blank lozenge area. That would be time-consuming (Time = Money). The alternative they chose, again I am assuming, was to be as non-labour intensive and easy at the print shop as possible, and was to make plates that required only one scrape at the printers. I am assuming of course that they did not use separate sets of colour plates for cents and pence - this would have required probably two different complete sets of the three colour plates, which I would say is a huge hassle and cost for one tiny area on the cover, for what was probably a print run of 2% of the total. I have to prefer the more time-saving alternative which is that they designed and made only one set of CMY colour plates, ran off the US covers, then quickly scraped one colour plate in the press shop and ran the second lot. If that assumption is valid, then the pence copies could not possibly have been run first (fight!!) because to print them all the lettering surround in that area that would be needed for the cents copies to make the surrounding to the month lettering had been scraped away to make the blank lozenge. The only other way to do it would have been to add material to the pence plates to make cents plates which has to be impossible, as it would be adding lettering surround, not lettering - because the lettering is reversed out. So what do the cents copies tell us? The month lettering is white (letter area etched away on all three plates), but the surrounding area is probably* Cyan, a primary colour i.e. no Yellow or Magenta ink. The surrounding banner area on JIM #80 (it's similar but not quite the same for #77) is a dirty brown (what you get when you mix 100% Magenta with 100% Yellow and 100% Cyan - not black, which is why you need a K plate for solid black). So to get the white lettering to stand out on the cents copies but still be usable to easily make a pence cover, they created plates with Cyan but no Yellow or Magenta in the surrounding lozenge area so it prints Cyan, then to do the pence copies they scraped out the Cyan plate, so you get an all white lozenge. They had the option of using one of the other plate colours for the lettering surround, but I suggest chose Cyan because Magenta would have been too close to the logo banner colour (so look odd) and Yellow too close to white - so not very readable. Cyan was the simple one-plate choice which was different enough from both brown and white. [*This is assuming the area surrounding the white text IS Cyan. There's not many pixels to look at! It could have been green - i.e. Cyan plus Yellow, which would have required two scrapes. But even two is less hassle than three.] Another query one might have is why have an empty lozenge on the pence copies at all - why not "fill it in" with logo banner colour so there's nothing visible at all? The problem here is that the cover designers have already made the decision to use a heavy dark logo banner colour, and then add cents issue details reversed out in white - it looks pretty cool too. Once that decision is made, you have to photograph and then etch away all the four plate areas that correspond to the numbers or letters. You cannot add back material (I am assuming) to "fill in" colour on plates so it matches the surrounds. The only changes you can make to that area is to scrape away more material, so it can only get lighter and eventually white, when all three colour plates lack that material. Empty white lozenge. This means there is no road that takes you from the pence copies printed first, with this reversed-out scenario. But by making a "month lettering lozenge" at the photographic stage with just one colour plate containing the lettering surround, you have a quick and dirty way to get from cents to pence with just one careful scrape, then you can run off the pence copies ready for the gloomy watery hold of the SS Britannia. I expect the professionals who did the origination work were past masters at rapidly coming up with the required quick and dirty strategies to spend the least cash and waste the minimum print time. Does that make sense? It is a related but different (reversed) set of arguments when you are looking at say black lettering printed on a white or coloured cover, but it's still a scrape - in this case, an easy one as you just scrape away the raised lettering on the plate, not the surrounding area to match a particular shape (like the lozenge) on all three plates. As I said at the top it may be that they had two K plates, one for each price, or they had a way of swapping prices on the cents K plate. But the method described here only needs one set of colour plates. Geoff Addendum: they COULD also have photographically created two Cyan plates I guess, one for the cents copies (with the month lettering surrounds in cyan) and one with nothing there for the pence copies (to match the other two plates, making an empty lozenge). That would obviate the necessity to carry out the Cyan plate scrape, and I am not competent to judge the additional costs and hassle of doing it one way against the other, but my instinct tells me that Atlas would rather die than create more colour plates than necessary, particularly for such a small print run. However if they did have two Cyan plates, they could do the cents and pence runs in either order. Any views? Geoff

I collected UK weekly comics in the 1960s as a lad - Valiant, Hotspur, Rover & Wizard and so on, all shared with an elder brother. Then I started collectng my own stuff - TV Century 21, Lady Penelope (because it shared the same Gerry & Sylvia Anderson world, of course) and then WHAM!, POW! and SMASH! with all the Marvel stories within. I had stacks of all five books in an attic room in our big house, which was owned by the school where my dad was head teacher. Then shortly before we moved house I went on a one-week residential music course - I was about 14. I had left all my comics in the attic, assuming that someone would pack them up - they were like treasure to me so I assumed they were to other family members - duuuh. When I returned it was to our new house, which was tiny in comparison to the previous one. As a result of the lack of space, there were dozens and dozens of cardboard boxes of stuff stacked high in the garage, completely filling it. I had no idea whether my prized comics were there, and my brother (who I had assumed would pack them) had gone off to University. My parents disavowed all knowledge. As the house was also full of boxes there was no way to burrow in there and try to find what was there. It wasn't until we moved again two years later to a slightly larger house that I could finally get to all the boxes and open them up. You guessed it - no sign. Although I had had a long time to prepare for this likely outcome, it was a real sickener and I still feel it to this day. Yes, I know I could chase back issues but they wouldn't be MY copies, the ones I lovingly bought, read and stacked every single week for several years. Eventually I tasked my elder brother about what happened - he just said he was told to throw away everyting in that room. It would have been chaos in the final days before the move, I guess. And of course this story told and re-told literally a million times or more is why Action #1 and Detective #27 are so valuable. And even TV Century 21 #1 goes for a few quid.

Thanks for this well-laid-out reply - I wish I could do that kind of thing. Your argument is sound as far as I understand the printing process, and without thinking clearly about how the printing is done I think I jumped to a hasty conclusion. Looking back over this thread and the conversations with Aman618 back in Jan 2018 (page 13), what we have is a 5-plate print process - Cyan, Magenta and Yellow (which would be the same for both Cents and pence runs) and then two black or K plates (one with Cents price and one with Pence, but otherwise identical. One price run would be done, then just the K plate would be changed and the second run done. In order to print the red colour correctly in the logo, both the Yellow and Magenta plates have to have that section of the plate raised (i.e. not etched away) in order for both to pick up ink: the addition of magenta to yellow gives the red colour. If for any reason the magenta fails to print, you will get yellow as seen in the Cents Logo Colour Variant. This could not happen as a result of ink running out as with some printing errors, as only this small area is affected. If my earlier suggestion (that the yellow patch variant came off the presses earlier, and then got corrected) was right, this would mean that at the start of printing, on the Magenta plate the raised area required to add magenta ink in that patch was missing. Then, to fix it there and then, somehow the printers would have had to build up the surface in that area to give the ink a surface to coat.I don't know whether that is possible - I can imagine something being scraped off, but not added. Your alternative, that printing started with correct Yellow plus Magenta (=red), but then that section of the Magenta plate started to fragment (first giving a "tell-tale" partial yellow/red patch) and finally fell off completely (leaving just yellow for the rest of the Cents run) seems much more plausible. Perhaps there are more than one "intermediate" stages in the disintegration. And then of course as you suggest, the K plate was swapped and the Pence run performed. Hang on, I've just realised what a rabbit hole I'm taking the thread down. Apologies. However if anyone reading this knows of a more relevant thread I could consult about how comic printing was managed, let me know. Best, Geoff

Hi Guys Re: Pence/Cents - which were printed first? I have been slowly working my way through some very ordinary late Silver/Bronze Cents and Pence Marvels I own, as I don't currently log which cover price they are. I washed up at my Pence copy of FF #119 (Feb 1972) - not exactly the rarefied period covered so lovingly in this thread, but it might be of some small interest in the old "who printed what first" debate - at least for this one book on that one day. This is not because I have a view about "which is better" but just because actual visible cover evidence that informs the question (as seen beautifully with Marwood's price font research) seems to be rare. FF #119 is in the middle of a long Pence run of issues and saw the introduction of the (much disliked by me) "new" blocky FANTASTIC FOUR logo. I usually use GCD to quickly check what cover variants are known, to see if they already have a Pence cover image. Yesterday I was surprised to see there were TWO Cents cover variants posted on GCD - a Cents cover referred to as a "Color-Correct Logo Variant" and another Cents cover simply labelled "Regular Edition". No Pence cover. Hmmm. I uploaded a scan of my grubby Pence copy so including mine ("British") there are now three covers at https://www.comics.org/issue/1648308/cover/4/. I hope that link works - it should show all three covers side by side. I have uploaded my Pence cover, water damage and all. Where is this leading? Remember this is the very first printing of an FF book with the new logo. Look on the GCD page at the three cover logos between the "F" and "A" of FANTASTIC. There is a rogue yellow patch in my UK Pence (which I had never noticed) AND the Cents "Regular" covers, which has evidently been corrected in the "Color-Correct Logo Variant". Looking elsewhere online both versions of Cents copies are out there, in approximately 50/50 split. Now this is an argument from circumstantial evidence, but to me the only rational account of what happened in the printers is that they had the new-but-defective logo plate (sorry I am hazy on the technical side but someone much more knowledgeable will know what I mean) ready to go, and they started off the run on the Pence 6p copies, which would have been a very short run (maybe 5% of the total). No-one noticed the rogue yellow patch in the logo - it isn't obvious unless you know what you are looking for. Then they swapped the 20c part in for the 6p part, and continued the run, still with the yellow glitch. At some point someone noticed, said a bad word, they stopped the presses, corrected the logo plate and started up again hoping no-one would get into trouble... The result is all the Pence copies have the logo glitch, and some Cents do and some don't. I cannot see any other logical course of events and this would unambiguously place the Pence printing before the Cents - on that day, with this book, in that print house. Of course 1972 in Sparta Illinois is a long time away from 1960. If there were any Pence copies without the logo glitch that would amaze me and confound my argument, but images of unimportant pence copies are scarce out there. This evidence relies on five things all happening: there being (a) an error in the cover printing which is (b) not obvious on a quick check, (c) clearly identifiable once you know where to look (d) fixed mid-run and finally (e) on a day when both Pence and Cents are being printed. Quite unlikely? I wonder if there might be others out there relating to books which had a Pence run? By the way I gave a link to the GCD page rather than try to upload all three images to this forum firstly because it was easy, but also because as a newbie I have not tried uploading images and didn't want to make a mess. I hope I haven't contravened any unwritten code of conduct by doing so. I would have had to copy the GCD images to upload them anyway. Cheers, Geoff Later Edit: Well I have looked around online for more Cents covers of FF #119 and interestingly - and this may blow my precious theory above out of the water - there are Cents copies which are intermediate in their yellow or red in that logo patch, with some red and some yellow - for example see https://www.pedigreecomics.com/auction/comic/015486/fantastic-four-119-cgc-94-ow-w There are other examples online that look just the same. So maybe for some technical reason the colouring of that area was just flaky? Perhaps a doyen of printing might comment? I might be forced to withdraw my case! Ah well. Geoff

I can't agree more about the price font stuff - that is directly relevant both to cents copies and to pence copies and how in practice they were actually produced, which is not only of interest in general terms but also informs about the cents vs pence "value" debate as it shows even more clearly that the pence copies are price variants (same day, same presses etc). Also, not forgetting it is just a bluddy luvverly piece of visual detective work - but your eyes have to be open to see what you saw!

Hi Kevin J, Marwood and Redshade and thanks for the great welcome. I prefer Buster Gonad, of course. As far as publication of the accumulated pence data goes, my opinion (as someone not very knowledgeable about the Overstreet Price Guide) is that it belongs in the Price Guide as a stand-alone expert article. I don't have the Guide from ?2010 when Jon McClure (I think) defined the variants including 1A for the first time, but I think the page count for that article was around 20 pages or more? I would argue that what the Price Guide needs far more than endless very dull lists of record prices achieved (which those genuinely interested can find on GPA or CGC - and much more up to date too!) is information about the breadth of comic book lore around the world. The richness of it, not the money. I would also very tentatively suggest that the list of Overstreet advisors (all I am certain deservedly eminent in the fields) might benefit from a few more non-North American voices. Among the 150 or so listed advisors there are around a dozen from Canada, one from Australia and one based in China, the rest being our friends in the US. None from the UK or indeed anywhere else in the world. Heavens to Betsy, surely four or five UK-based collectors or dealers should be invited. Or maybe they have been, and declined.... It would be just great to see some UK-based people in the Market Report section.

Hi Marwood I just spent the last week reading this whole Marvel Pence thread all the way through. Like others I am in awe of the gigantic task you have accomplished not only for the Marvels (my interest) but also for the other publishers. The data assembled, together with your work with educating the general comics collecting readership (through forums like this, with Duncan McAlpine, working with Jon McClure contributing to Overstreet, and getting the grading companies to come on board) is changing the way in which the UK price variants are being understood and enjoyed. As a boy I picked up a few early Silver Age Marvels in the north of England piecemeal from mid-1963, the excitement mixed with the trauma of non-appearance of the long-pined for next issues with no conception of the mechanics of distribution. Hiding those we could find from our parents and re-reading them under the bedcovers until they were in tatters. Keys owned? None. Copies FN or higher? None. Lots of sellotape and lots of thrills. Come 2018 and the success of the MCU meant it was no longer deeply deviant to admit to liking - or even collecting - the books themselves. A little spare cash allowed some careful value-for-money back issue buying, but I still possess none of the top 50 Silver or Bronze Keys. Clearly a failed collector! But reading the Overstreet 2018 and 2019 market reports and flicking through Ebay, something seemed to be going wrong. The magical tatty cheaply-printed books of my early years were being bought up by CEO investors, and all the talk was of higher and higher record prices. Were collectors ever actually reading their books? Then I found this thread. Suddenly I was taken back to 1963, written by people who love those books that I once read, without worrying about tatty covers. Not only that, there was genuine interest in something so bound up with my life in the UK in the 1960s, a million miles away from modern auctions and such. How did those comics get to the newsagent at the bottom of my road? Why did some issues never arrive? Now as a result of everything I have read this week I can see an interesting direction to my collecting and one which is truer to my own story. I can't bid for AF #15 in 9.2 (or even 0.2) but I can seek out actual books that came over in the ships in the 1960s-1970s and which have remained here. Looking for, and more to the point holding and reading these pence copies is something that makes sense where looking endelssly at the prices of Keys doesn't. I now have the fun of going back through my modest collection and seeing which ones actually are pence copies - my listings never differentiated pence and cents!! Thank you, and all your colleagues who helped along the way. The work is appreciated - it would be good to see it published. Keep well, Geoff