Malacoda

Apart from all the obvious similarities, I like the fact that the giant stone baddie is actually called Thorr. Do you think Mr. Kane is winking at us?

They do seem to share the same interior designer. Do you reckon he did that 'dentist's waiting room' look in everyone's home?

Both of those covers are odd. Lloyd's hand, as you say is massive, but why is he holding it up like that? It looks like he's just enumerated 4 reasons she should go with him. Or he's about to break into 'Stop in the name of love'. Meanwhile, the other is randomly pointing, seemingly at the word 'wondered' and both ladies are holding their heads like they're about to do a classic mask removal. (I had to post this one btw, as I just love the fact that Hawkeye is somehow wearing a mask under his mask).

It's a shame Hulk didn't leave a him-shaped hole in the wall the way Supes did.

Just re-reading this thread, this is a really cool spot.

Not sure but the fact that he specifies that they were British variants and knows they were distributed by T&P makes me think he's not a civilian. The DC's definitely sound like recirculated T&P's, I assume the Dells and Kings were too. Can you recall if they were stamps or PV's? (Obviously the reduced 6d was a stamp or a sticker, but the original price?). Not sure if I understand what you mean. Obviously all the papers and magazines and UK comics and books on sale in Woolies would have been from UK distributors. I can't imagine Woolworths striking separate deals in the US with King & Dell & IND & Charlton etc and then exporting the comics to the UK to supply their stores. I think they'd just go to T&P like everyone else.

That last one was a leftover that came up when I clicked reply. On a (you'll be pleased to hear) unrelated topic, I just wanted to capture this note someone on sochal meeja made about T&P copies of MAD being re-circulated in Woolworths in Kettering (that's Kettering-Decidely-Not-On-Sea, but very near Leicester). " A key recollection of Woolies is them selling old, classic British MAD Magazines in the 60s for a shilling each (presumably remaindered by Thorpe and Porter)."

Because you're thinking about it back to front. Imagine this for a moment: you change over to containers. You want to test the system by sending a test batch of new print DC's to T&P in the UK in the same way that you do with Marvel. What price are you going to put on your UK export comics? Cents or pence.

Thank you for everything today. That must have been quite draining. (This probably isn't the moment to pitch Unified Stamp Theory, right?)

I think it's brilliant that a discussion about 5 comics and container shipping 50 years ago has out-trended marijuana. But having said, they probably just got so close to their subject that they couldn't type any more. Also, there's probably quite a lot of Doc Strange and Silver Surfer fans in there.

Don't be. There are other issues around this I didn't even get into. To @themagicrobot 's point, I suspect this might have been a management up. A lack of communication. Imagine this for a moment: WCP's big selling point was pool shipping, right? So whereas other printers did their jobs and passed on their delivery costs, WCP had a huge advantage of scale. Instead of delivering this magazine to these outlets and those journals to these outlets, WCP printed so much that they just delivered everything together. So instead of delivering titles individually, they would deliver hundreds of thousands of issues of thousands of different publications by dozens of different publishers to every city all on the same lorries. This meant that every publisher paid a fraction of the overall delivery charge. Now, they never had Marvel until 1968, but when they got Marvel it was all new comics being loaded up, and they had had DC since 1955, so the obvious thing to do was put them all together and distribute DC and Marvel together, which I am 100% sure they did for US distribution (it was kind of the point of using Sparta). However, they could never do it for the UK orders because Marvel sent new stuff via Sparta, and DC sent zillions of comics to the UK but they were all returns. This is pretty annoying as Marvel and DC have the same UK distributor, so if you could land the DC order, you could just add it to the existing Marvel order. Especially now you've got container shipping. Imagine you're boss of Sparta. If you could pitch DC an idea which would make them send their UK distributor (whom they own) new comics instead of these bloody returns, then (a) you get a massive new print order (b) it's very low cost (because you've already created all the plates for the US copies) and (c) it's also reducing your delivery costs on Marvel because everything goes in the same container. So maybe you pitch DC the PV / new comics / container idea. Maybe they're thinking it over and agree to a trial. Now you just have to complete containerisation. Unfortunately, what you don't know at this point is that as soon as you go containerised, Marvel are going to use that very thing to change UK distributor. So the trial goes ahead, but actually you stop pushing it because the big advantage to you, the pool shipping, has sailed away. That's just one scenario. I'm sure we can all think of a dozen scenarios where this trial got onto the schedule for some reason and ended up being pulled immediately.

You mean you want to me to do the whole thing again with only 80% of the detail?

No, that's cool. Sometimes there's a smoking gun. Once, I asked Mark Evanier a question and he began with 'Ah, I asked Sol Brodsky that very question. Here's the answer...' I mean..... But this is just a theory. I don't think we're ever going to get to the bottom of this one, but it's a fantastic mental work out for your comics brain, ain't it?

Because, along with reduced shipping charges, faster more regular supply and lovely new shiny comics, the PV's would be the other selling point that would seduce T&P into giving up their beloved returns. If you're trying to sell someone into something, you don't leave out a big obvious benefit. Also, repeating myself I know, but printing the PV's was really not like going to Mordor. In the time we've just spent (since last night) discussing the issue of Sparta printing PV's, they would have printed a million PV's. I mean literally 960,000 and counting.

I think that's the wrong question. I'm pretty sure DC and IND and WCP and probably even T&P didn't really give a stuff what happened to Ethel as long as it maximised their profits.

Well, this is a really good question, and eventually it must have gone over to container shipping because everything did. However, my point was that WCP went over to containers (and very early) which created the question. Also, it wouldn't be the only cost change: if they went over to the new system it would newly printed comics, all coming from Sparta, all in one shipment and sent by container, as opposed to returns being gathered up and trucked from all over the country. That repatriation cost and the costs involved in sorting out the returns into batches of each title would also be avoided.

Well, you could also say 'selling comics through comic shops rather than news vendors is basically the same thing' but it really wasn't. Malcolm McLean was described by Forbes 'as one of the few men who changed the world' because of containerisation. Printer to van to port over sea to port to distributor is not the massive change. Printer into container which drives straight to the port and into the ocean without being unloaded, sails the ocean arriving in half the time, still does not need to be unloaded, goes door to door, is fully trackable all the way, is so secure that all your stuff doesn't get nicked and it all costs a fraction of what it used to cost is the massive change. But I grant you, if he was de-materialising the comics in Sparta and re-forming them in Leicester in a Star Trek stylie, that would be a significantly larger change. and before you ask, no, I couldn't find one of Nightcrawler. 😒

Fulchester Rovers.

I'm struggling to follow that. Obviously Marvel never exported returns and never would have, I think. Re DC, it would tell them cost and time of new product straight out of Sparta vs cost and time for the returns system. It would also operationally test the system at both ends. I think it's probable that the first container lorry that ever arrived at Thurmaston had a mix of returns these 5 issues.

No one. Marvel had always had wayyyyy greater sell through than DC (and for a long time, supply choked off by Harry Donenfeld), so Marvel never had the mountain of returns that DC did. I think that Fred's deal for PV's was probably negotiated directly with Marvel and ECP and IND were not involved. That's why the deal with Marvel is so different to DC. If you think it through, it goes like this: From 1957, IND were doing everything to screw Marvel over. Marvels in the US were distributed by IND, who massively restricted how many titles they could have. So if Marvel had wanted the DC deal with Fred, they would have to have gone cap in hand to IND to scoop up all the returns to export to the UK, which would have just replicated the same situation they were in in the US: DC would have chopped them off at the knees with a terrible deal again. And Fred expected returns at dirt cheap prices. However, if they dealt directly with Fred with new comics rather than returns (of which they had few and those few they had were in the hands of IND), they could strike a totally advantageous deal and utterly cane DC in the UK. Also, I think because DC so limited Marvel's opportunities in the US (and because Stan was an Anglophile with an English wife), Marvel were always far more focussed on the UK market. For Marvel, from 1969, T&P had always been supplied directly out of Sparta, so when Sparta changed over to containers, Marvel just went that way. There was nothing to test because Marvel had no choices to make. Also they were gagging for it. The minute everything went containers, they flipped straight to World. Sorry those points sound disjointed, but the connection is that Marvel were always on a completely different path to DC and so there was no testing to do.

Well, that's a different 'they'. DC were printed in Sparta from 1955 onwards. In the 60's Marvel were printed by ECP who were a much smaller outfit. That aside, the reason is that T&P wanted the returns for below-wholesale costs rather than wholesale for, you know, wholesale costs. Also, printing a single run of 5 issues as a one-off experiment is obviously not the same as printing a publishing house's entire output for a decade, but I think the real point is that what Sparta charged customers was what the market would bear and what it cost them was a very different number. We may be confusing the expense associated with a one-off proof of concept with their actual business model.

True, but the fact that you're already doing something doesn't mean you will never do anything else. If the fact that they had been on the returns system for 11 years in 1971 meant they couldn't possibly change, then they would definitely not be able to change in 1978 when they'd been on it for 18 years. But that's exactly what happened.

No, not at all. I think our question is 'why did DC experiment with PV's?' because we're obsessed with PV's, but maybe asking that question is like when you ask of a magician 'wow, how did he do that?' to which the answer is, invariably, that he didn't. Re the fight back, keep it coming. I'm only 2 hours behind now.

Receiving DC comics directly from Sparta via container shipping. You're actually kind of agreeing with me in the issue that you're identifying. Why did DC experiment with PV's at this point when they had all the data from Marvel? PV's. Tick. Printed in Sparta. Tick (and ECP). First run new comics. Tick. Exported to T&P. Tick. They were even the distributor for Marvel in the first 5 months when Marvel were sending both stamps and PV's to T&P. And owned T&P. The only thing that had change was the shipping method. And, as far as I can see, the only thing that was tested by this tiny 5 comic trial, was the shipping method.