• When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.

Malacoda

Member
  • Posts

    1,655
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Malacoda

  1. It would have been a fun nod to the scandalous (and unaired in the US) episode if C&B had created their Hellfire Club as opponents for the Avengers and not the Xmen.
  2. By the way, I imagined that someone would say it's the only example of a cover being re-drawn from the opposite perspective, so well done for not falling into that trap. By the way, spot the deliberate mistake....
  3. OK, here comes the answer..... In the 1960’s, Kirby was Marvel’s pre-eminent artist, but also by some margin the pre-eminent cover artist (he did runs of 101 straight FF covers, no exceptions, 95 JIM/Thor covers with 3 exceptions, about 80% of TOS, 76% of TTA, as well as Avengers, Xmen, DD, ST & Sgt Fury and others). In the 1970’s, Marvel became the reprint kings, with many dedicated reprint titles (MT, MTA, MDF, MA, MGC, MSA, MS, MSH and all the monster titles), some headline titles that became all reprint (Xmen, ST, Sgt Fury) and, of course, all the one-off ‘dreaded deadline doom’ reprints. In many cases, they created new covers. Quite exactly what determined if a comic got a new cover or not was pretty baffling. Some horrendous covers were kept outright or just ‘pepped up’ a bit, while some properly iconic covers were replaced. I mean, these are great covers….. but seriously, who looked at 48 and 49 and decided they needed replacing? 50 maybe. The pre-eminent cover artist of Marvel in the 70’s was of course, Gil Kane. So this meant that at one point or another, he replaced just about everyone’s art. At one point, he even looped right round and replaced his own…… But as the King was the number #1 cover artist of the 60’s and Kane was the number #1 replacer of that art in the 70’s, this meant that Sugar Lips replaced more of the King’s art than anyone else’s (that’s a supposition, btw, feel free to prove me wrong). Then in 1976, Kirby returned to Marvel and got used, once again, for a surprising amount of cover art, some of which was for reprint titles. However, despite a number of examples of Kane covers replacing Kirby’s, as far as I know, the only example of a Kirby cover replacing Kane is MTA 29. I imagine someone will now prove me wrong. My money is on @Garystar
  4. Lamentably not.... But stay on Kirby, you're heading in the right direction.
  5. That is true and a good spot, but not unique. Not even unique for MTA.
  6. A clever and subtle answer because sometimes they did re-edit the reprints so even someone who was in the original could get chopped out. But no.
  7. I'll leave it for a day so everyone can take a swing at it. Check back tomorrow for the exciting answer. If you can bear the suspense.
  8. Awwww. Thank you. I've probably bored you with this one before, but just in case I haven't, can anyone tell the class what's unique about this cover?
  9. This is not really relevant, but I just noticed something that intrigued me. Notice how the cover of ASM #79 went for a wild ride between it's original printing, it's reprint in Marvel Tales and it's subsequent reprint in the UK (SMCW 97, rather pleasingly the original number inverted). Notice how from the original, Peter Parker gets changed into Spider Man in Marvel Tales and then the UK version retains him being in costume, but changes the shape of the 'to prowl no more' blurb and adds speech bubbles for both Jonah and the Prowler.... EXCEPT....that's not what happened. The UK reprint actually predates the US reprint, so they redrew PP as Spidey for the UK cover and then retained it for the US MT reprint, putting the 'to prowl no more' blurb back as it was (or just lifting Spidey off the UK plate). Interesting to note how the colours change. Jonah's suit changes from brown to orange in the UK and back to a paler brown on MT, also his shirt & tie change colour. Also the sky and building are different colours in the UK print and different again in the MT reprint. Another fun difference is that for the UK reprint, they had to add more buildings to the NY back drop because the UK covers were wider, but when they did the US reprint, there's actually less of NY even than the original because the title takes up more room. Every now and again, I get the feeling I've spent too much time staring at comics. I'll probably go to bed now.
  10. This is a beautiful post, Albert. I read it three times. I can hear the Last of the summer wine music playing as I read it. Here in the wild west (of London) I never got any comics from markets, but from some startlingly varied shops: Books, Bits & Bobs (Kingston) was a magic shop and costumiers that sold comics; West Middlesex Books & Things (Hounslow) was a junk shop (of which not a single picture exists), and Marion Pitman Books was a relatively upmarket book sellers by Twickenham Green....shockingly, not even the proprietor (still with us, still selling books) has a picture of that shop. I've no idea how I stumbled onto any of these places, but given my mania for comics, I probably asked in every magic shop, junk shop, booksellers, travel agent, launderette, bookmakers, fish and chip shop....
  11. Those old comic annuals jolt you back in time like nothing else, don't they? I think it was because they were in the shops for months, but you had to wait until Christmas day to get your hands on it. The anticipation was exquisitely unbearable.
  12. A shilling and thruppence! Ethel didn't break that stamp out too often.
  13. Indeed, also an Austrian schilling was about 2.5 new pence in the 70's, so you wouldn't have had a equivalence of 2 Austrian schillings to 10p, but two old UK shillings was 10p.
  14. Very good point. $600 then being about $3,736 now and comics fetching nowhere near the same premium in the 70's. You'd have to have filled one suitcase with keys & ND's just to cover the air fare. That said, I'm sure the Robot's point about the Tinternet is true. Given that US copies outnumbered UK copies by at least 20 to 1, there are going to be far more US copies of pretty much anything available, but it's still going to happen that US bidders bid on UK located keys and grails, especially if they're happy to take a pence variant (those would obviously not be the stampies your LCS pal is keeping under the counter for you).
  15. It's for Steve to say, but I think we have a broad enough base (well I certainly do!) to accommodate that on this thread. After all, they are US comics that were distributed in the UK first, before a rather baffling homing instinct kicked in. I assume there are so few of these that they could be attributed to individual collectors bringing them over and later selling them?
  16. And the crazy price, probably. Two years ago I was watching the price of silver age bags go up before my eyes, so I bought 500 to keep me going. Since then they've gone from 13p each to 18p each (which is a total con - modern size comic bags are 10p each, but who wants to bag those). Oh how I wish I'd bought a few thousand Mylites 5 years ago.
  17. I think it happened all over with a couple of exceptions. Nostalgia & Comics in Birmingham retained its identity - they opened a separately branded FP store to sell all the merch and figurines. N&C is now called World's Apart as is the one in Liverpool, but they are both owned by FP. I guess the one we can't blame them for was the SF Bookshop in Edinburgh, a legendary shop now replaced by the anodyne FP on South Bridge: Penman and Hamilton who owned it became share holders in FP, so it's not as though they were railroaded into oblivion. On the plus side, the original premises, which you'd imagine are now a Baby Gap or a Starbucks are in fact a music shop, so that's something.