Malacoda

Lamentably not.... But stay on Kirby, you're heading in the right direction.

That is true and a good spot, but not unique. Not even unique for MTA.

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.

No, completely new is the right direction.

Keep going....you're very warm.

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.

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?

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.

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....

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.

A shilling and thruppence! Ethel didn't break that stamp out too often.

Hence the expression Batsh1t crazy.

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.

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).

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?

the most frightful villain ever. you can say that again.

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.

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.

You were actually right both times, which you can see on the advert you posted. The shop in the University Precinct on Oxford Road was called Odyssey 7 but they had another branch in the Corn Exchange (also on your ad) which was just called Odyssey. The latter was totalled (along with a sizeable chunk of Manchester) in the 1996 IRA bombing. After the bombing, during the rebuilding, FP bought them out and opened up a single shop but not at either of the previous locations, at a new location on Oldham St. However, they re-hired a lot of Odyssey staff. @Redshade 's Leeds branch, also just called Odyssey, is also on your ad.

Sorry. I was going to replace him with somebody worse, but....well, you see the problem.

Kev, if you'd really fixed it, I'd have a spare bedroom and not an impressive Care Bears library.

I'd have gone with......

Oh Jesus. I actually want to know how a scarf was the key to the door of love. Please have a butcher's and let us know. (This is why there are 3 rooms of my house I can't get into because they're floor to ceiling with terrible comics).

Looking at the Wasp and the Man Beast there, it's amazing (given how litigious they can be) how many character names have both DC and Marvel incarnations. Marvel have at least 2 characters called the Scarecrow, though DC's is more famous than either. DC have a Sabre Tooth. DC had a Carnage that everyone forgot about. They also had Doctors called Strange and Doome. They both have Enchantresses ( along with Thor, Hercules and all the pantheon that are copyright free) and perhaps most Amazingly, DC had a Spider Man first. And he was a foe for....you know....he who shall not be named....

In the Derek & Clive sense?