Malacoda

You get extra points for making a Sid James - Bless This House - type era-appropriate gag.

Just found this in an old box. Strangely, it completely failed to have a long forgotten copy of ASM #1 in it. What do you notice about this? (Let's not always see the same hands).

MMmmmm. And the Miller stamps are both 6d's which makes it look like they both got sent back to the wrong distributor but then re-priced and sent back out anyway, because....why wouldn't you? I note 70 is a 1 but 74 is still only a 2. The usual DC chaos.

I don't remember them at all, but I was probably off the Doctor by then. I remember the Brain of Morbius as being really gruesome and scary (i.e. brilliant) but after that I was out. I think I watched intermittently, but after Lalla Ward's comedy regenerations and the robot dog, I was out for 25 years.

You're examining this because it might actually be a rare Charlton, right?

Almost perfect.

OK guys, I thought I'd better alert you to this bargain. £300. Empty Weetabix box. Thank me later.

Ouch. I hate losing by a quid. I'd rather pay more than I wanted and then forget I overpaid than get pipped at the post and never forget it. Condolences.

I definitely remember buying Iron Man 75 long after (years after) it was out and with a re-price sticker. Can't access my comics at the moment, but will find it at some point. However, that was the same newsagent again, so doesn't add anything.

Thanks. And those 12p stickers look very much like T&P stickers. Do we know that T&P were distributing Charltons in 1976?

Right, but I think your post also opens up the much wider conversation that distributors as well as probably sales reps and newsagents were all scurrying in all kinds of ways to stay ahead of 27% inflation. I can remember being infuriated that every time comics went up by a penny it put them further away from my meagre pocket money, but really 2p and 3p increases would have been more in line with inflation.

Interesting. Noted. Thank you. If I understand, this is PV Charlies (duals) rocking up in the UK at first importation and, due to bonkers inflation since they were printed, being repriced to 12p directly from 10p before even hitting the spinners, right? So it's the same environment, but a key difference is the Marvels were seemingly distributed at cover price up to 2 years earlier, then re-circulated with stickers, having jumped straight across 3 price increases.

Update on this. I had always assumed it was my newsagent who was opening the Lucky Bags and repricing them (if, indeed, that was happening), because I only ever saw it at this one newsagents (though it seems very unlikely to me that that was the only one doing it, given what we know about returns never finding their way into the pulper). Recently, I finally found another one of these for sale. Ghost Rider 11 from April 1975, repriced all the way from 8p to 12p (+50%, nice work if you can get it) some time after March 1977. So the same as the Thor above. Why am I telling you this? Because, unless he happened to shop at the same newsagent to me, it might well indicate it was the sales rep, not the newsagent. I checked the seller. He was from Slough (about 13 miles from my newsagent, so almost certainly the same rep). But then I got chatting with the seller (lovely chap) and he told me that he bought his comics on the way to school from a kiosk on Osterley station which is less than 3 miles from my newsagent. So pretty much certainly the same world rep. Can we agree, it would be an almost impossible coincidence for two different newsagents miles apart to unearth three different comics, years apart and re-price them to the then-current price of 12p with the same stickers. This has to be the world rep, doesn't it?

I see it's Charlatan, not Charlton, but the reference to cancer must be unintentional, surely? I mean, they're bad, but not that bad.

There's a number of incidences of companies using names or slogans that later became unfortunate, but calling yourself 'the Big C' ....?