Malacoda

At this stage, the minutes of T&P board meetings would be like porn to me. Which is ironic considering that is probably what they spent most of the time discussing.

Agree. I mean, if they had several consecutive months of issues turning up in the same batch, some issues turning up month after month, some titles never putting in an appearance and some months when literally every comic that rocked up had already turned up in a previous month and they couldn't sort any of that out, there's no chance these 5 rogue issues got their own VIP treatment.

Sorry, you have the go ahead. Not so much that it was unknown as new and untested. I don't think ascertaining the cost was by any means the key issue. Keep in mind that this would involved big changes at the other end too. There is absolutely no way that the warehouse in Thurmaston was built with container facilities. Not a chance. I don't have a pic of the warehouse, but this is what Thurmaston looked like.

Completely agree, though it may not even have been that way round. T&P may have been buying returns by the ton (literally, Fred started out buying newspapers by the ton, sold the supplements as glossy mags and shipped the paper to India as wrapping paper). Might be that the PV's were foisted on them at significantly increased cost and the reason it got no further was because they absolutely refused. By the time T&P went over to PV's in 1978, there had been 3 changes in management, so it was a very different world by then.

Again, I think the PV's are bi-product. Keeping the machines running, well, they loaded the presses with 6 tons of paper at a time, they printed about 11 comics per second and the plant ran 24 hours a day. I feel like our imaginings of time saving and cost savings and so on are probably not based on reality. I think, however, relative to the profit margins on each comic at T&P, which was surely fractions of a penny, laying off a few Ethels might have actually had a measurable impact.

I agree, but Ethel was probably a single cost wholly attributable to the comics which was wholly eliminable by PV's. You couldn't do anything about the fixed costs, but she was a wholly variable cost. (Sorry, Eth).

I think it would have been advantageous for list of reasons I posted a few feet back (I think, getting a bit punchy now and I lost a couple of posts when the power went off). However, I don't know if T&P originated this, I think Sparta going over to container shipping is the key and I don't think T&P did solicit UKPV's in the sense that that was the point of the exercise. I think that Sparta changing over to containers opened up the possibility that first run supply with container shipping was now viable and, as long as that was happening, it would have made no sense NOT to change to PV's.

I do love it. If you hadn't dropped a turd on my last theory, I wouldn't have had to come up with this one. I did point out right at the start that you kicked the carp out of that one, so I was basically grabbing my ankles on this one too. Also, I did call it DC PV 2: Electric Boogaloo. Clue in the name. But I think there's a lot of good info in there and I think doing this (hoisting a theory) is exactly how we move forward. Plus it's fun to get into it.

You say 'all they had to do' like a 3 month process of gathering up tens of thousands of returns in hundreds of trucks across 10 million square kilometres of country is easier than just leaving the printing press on for an extra 15 minutes. In our minds, these DC PV's are a big deal because they're a cool little mystery, but in terms of a Sparta print run, they are absolutely nothing. Keep in mind also that it's not the same place (as far as we know). Wherever DC batched up the returns, it wasn't Sparta. If it was, for example, the premises in Queens (which would be logical for the docks), that would be a thousand miles from Sparta. So sending a batch of returns by container from wherever returns returned to would not give you the same answer as from Sparta. However your point is completely valid: you could just ask my friend Mr. McLean 'how much to haul a million comics from A to B?' However again, my point is equally valid. Actually printing the comics was 15 minutes work. But you do raise a fascinating question: if we take the approach that the reason for the DC PV's has to be a question that is absolutely not more easily answered by any other method, then what the Hell was it? I mean, I still think my theory holds because I don't believe what they did was much of a stretch, but if we set ourselves the task of thinking of a reason that could not be satisfied by any other means, what on Earth would that be? (Again, I think we're in the business of imposing order on chaos here. If you ask an Ops Director a question, he comes up with an operational solution). If cost were the only issue, I think you'd have a valid objection here, but I think it was a massive change to the Ops process that was being dry-runned and the most efficacious way to check that would be to suck it and see. Think for a moment how Marvel tested the direct market. They didn't use focus groups and theory, they published Dazzler and Kazar as direct-only comics and waited to see what would happen. (Admittedly, if you publish Dazzler and Kazar and then wait to see what happens, you'd better get comfy).

They kind of weren't, which I think is a factor. This is the thing we parked.

Only that I think the explanation has to address a lot of questions and this one does, unfortunately without the proof we'd all like to see. For some things, you get a smoking gun. For others you can only work with the absence of one. I think the exact simultaneity of the product codes on both Marvel and DC, the change of Marvel's UK distributor and DC's flirtation with PV's are more likely to share a common cause than to be unrelated events. I think that the fact that the DC PV's were NOT returns is a key factor that needs to be addressed. I think 'why did they briefly do a small run of PV's?' is not the question so much as part of the answer to a different question.

It's not the price - and to be clear I mean it is neither the amount of the price nor whether it's stamped or printed on there. It's the change to Sparta sending it directly hot off the presses by container. The 9 unknowns. I think you're looking at the pence pricing as an end or target in itself. I think the experiment was everything else, but if T&P were getting new DC's off the presses (like they did Marvels), it would make absolutely no sense NOT to get PV's. They're not the reason, they're just a logical bi-product. Look at it this way: if T&P were going to trial new comics rather than returns, why would they not want PV's? If they were going to get DC's on the same basis now that they had always had Marvels, that would include PV's.

No, there was no blind shipping. They were loaded into a container in Illinois and didn't see daylight again until Ethel cracked open the crate in Thurmaston. The price would be for the container, regardless of the contents. The test is Sparta doing a run for IND/DC. And that is a world of unknowns, I believe. Sparta were a printers, not a DC warehouse (though the publishers all had offices nearby). Sparta did first run distribution to the local and regional distributors, wholesalers and in some cases the newsstands. For Marvel, they shipped directly from Sparta to the UK. For DC, Sparta shipped all over the US, and then IND rounded up all the unsold copies into the IND warehouse in God-Knows-Where, made them into logical batches (except we know they were a hot mess of bunching and multi-batching) and sent them to Leicester. Note: at the time Sparta flipped Marvel flipped onto container shipping, IND had not been their distributor for 2 years, so IND had no access to Marvel's shipping/distribution data. Old System: WCP distribute new comics to US wholesalers with cents prices, then IND round up the unsolds, batch them into sales consignments, haul them to the docks and ship them by traditional shipping / break bulk cargo to Liverpool, where they're hauled to Leicester to reprocessed by the Ethels and re-stamped with pence prices. New system: WCP print PV's and ship them by container directly, at time of printing, straight to Newark where they're shipped to Felixstowe in the same container, which is then driven to Leicester, where they're unpacked with no need for Ethel to re-stamp them and are ready for distribution. So there are 9 unknowns (not really unknowns so much as not-been-done-like-this-befores). Hence the test run.

Absolutely. Truth be told, for all we know this could have been an error. Maybe DC mooted the idea of PV's and then cancelled it, but these ones slipped through the net and actually served absolutely no purpose whatsoever.

Right, but I think that supports my contention. There was no time to get sales results in. It was operational test with implications for the cost base. I think it would have had a big impact on T&P's sales if they had had regular consistent monthly supplies and I think, as they now owned T&P, IND should have cared about that, but I don't think they did for reasons I'll come back to. It doesn't work as any kind of a commercial experiment, only an operational one.

I'm booking this one for the moment, I'll come back to it.

It's not having the price printed on them or even what that price is. It's that moving from returns to newly printed copies changes everything: instead of getting a random selection of leftovers, T&P could order what they wanted, the ordering window changes because you're getting them hot off the presses, not 3 to 6 months later, and sometimes in the wrong order, which changes your distribution because suddenly your reps are delivering the next month's comics every month instead of the DC lottery, the cost of the comics changes, because they're new prints not returns, the container shipping changes the whole schedule of importing, everything about it, the length of journeys, the tracking, the cost and process of importation, even down to which port they arrive at and how they're transported from it, and completely changes the cost of shipping. Exactly everything is different. Everybody's dead, Dave. They're all dead. Everybody's dead. Dave. But some of that was going to change anyway. The key thing is they're new prints not returns and the changes that ensue from that.

That's cool. The spark keeps killing my internet connection.

No, this is brilliant. I'm loving this. I've just got an electrician, a flooring guy and 2 blokes pouring concrete (some of it where it's meant to be) at the mo so slow to respond. I whacked out the theory last night because I knew I wouldn't have time for the next few days, but failed to consider the ensuing bunfight (which is great).

Right, but I think 1979 is a 5th hiatus, which I don't think you do? That's a much bigger headbanging session. Let's park that one for a minute.

I am loving these questions. This is really hammering the steel. Thank you. Well, Marvel stopped the stamps because container shipping enabled them to switch distributors but World's different system required PV's, so the two things go hand in glove. Let's keep in mind that when you import a US product into the UK for sale, the normal thing is to have a UK price on it. The only reason T&P had stamps on the comics is because they were second hand US rejects. DC differs because they continued to take returns. I get the feeling that you're making a deeper point than this which I'm failing to grasp. When Charlton, Dell King & Marvel had PV's they were first prints of new comics shipped directly to the UK. DC's were returns. An interesting question at this point is: when Charltons, Dells & Kings were stamps, were they returns or were they freshly minted cents copies?

Very good question. So we're on day one of container shipping, so the huge cost savings are still theoretical at this point, but I agree they'd have estimated numbers. However, why wouldn't you just print a batch of PV's? It would take a couple of minutes to change the plates over and then literally quarter of an hour to knock off 10,000 issues. The effort & cost to test the system was virtually non-existent. I also assume that the whole chain of events in distribution was changed by containers, so to actually know how it would affect IND, the best thing to do was a test.

Well....why not? I've no idea, but I find the fact that they did 4 in July and then added on the Flash from August quite compelling. Although the Flash has a cover date a month later, these were all printed within about 8 days of each other, so basically a week's output. I think the Flash was added because it was GS and therefore a different quantity by weight & size, so a good test. The fact that it was five kind of makes me more convinced, tbh. If there was a commercial / UK sales reason for it, it would have gone on for months (until the sales figures were in). If there was some other reason, maybe they would have done a whole month's issues. But 5 may be a handsome number in terms of shipping. Maybe 5 x 10,000 = a pallet? You're saying 5 like it's not a lot, but 50k thousand comics is literally half a ton. I guess, to bounce your question back at you, what would you learn from 10 or 15 that you wouldn't learn from 5? I think this was driven by IND or even Sparta (who were presumably getting an increased print run and a separate job out of it) rather than T&P. I imagine T&P were definitely interested in (1) reduced costs (2) reduced aggro (3) a clearer proposition for newsagents (4) clean, freshly minted copies rather than returns and (5) consistent batches of comics every month rather than the random madness we know rocked up......however.......I reckon their super cheap deal on the returns would have been VERY hard to wave goodbye to.

Cheaper being the motivation, but basically a test run of the new system. I think the key point is that we don't know how much effort/cost was involved in retrieving all the unsold returns, sorting them into batches of so many Supermans, so many Batmans to make a logical shipment for T&P, but we do know (a) that Marvel never did it and always found it cheaper to print & export fresh copies and (b) that the reason T&P wanted the returns is that they could get them dirt cheap - significantly lower than even the wholesale price. So let's assume it was incredibly marginal for IND. We also know (though we find it hard to believe) that Marvel, DC & all the publishers printed vast amount of comics that were never sold, were never going to be sold, so clearly distribution costs were the driver (see what I did there), not printing costs. Also, however they got all the comics back in from the thousands of local & national distributors who in turn got them back from the retailers, it can't have been on container lorries for most of the ride, so the process of getting everything back in to ship to T&P must have been far more expensive than the process of sending them out once containerisation arrived. Now, if containerisation offered DC/IND the possibility to reduce their shipping costs by an unimaginable figure (if the cost to distribute domestically was reduced to one-thirty-six of the old cost, the international export cost saving must have been even greater), it seems entirely possible to me that with container shipping, it was cheaper to just print a few hundred thousand extra as PV's and send them straight to the docks in a container. It would certainly be worth knocking out a few batches to find out.

Less a summary, more a dump of my entire hard drive on the subject, but I thought there was so much juicy detail in there it would be a shame to delete it all out.