Malacoda

I'm sure it gets down to those numbers. I believe I read in Rob Kirby's article in Alter Ego that MWOM #1 shifted 500k copies, but that was with TV advertising, it was new and exciting and had a free transfer, so I imagine numbers calmed down quite a bit. When Dez Skinn launched the Hulk comic that replaced it 7 years later, the print run was down to 250k, so I could well believe 350k was the magic number for a sizeable chunk of the run.

I suspect rarity, or at least perceived rarity is a factor. MWOM #1 reprints 3 grails, but it shifted half a million copies. Even if 90% got binned or destroyed, there's still 50,000 copies out there. And by that point, there were definitely Marvel collectors, far more than in the Odhams day...and MWOM was under a very distinct Marvel banner (don't say it). I suspect (please correct me) that no one really knows how many copies AC printed, or were sold, or were re-sold in subsequent redistributions, or were pulped and how many survived. Most of it was not Marvel reprints and even when they were, they were so non-sequential that no one could have been collecting & reading the MU that way. The AC ones may actually be literally a thousand times rarer than the Transworld ones. What's your take on the AC volumes, Gary? I suspect you know a thing or two.

@themagicrobot Indeed. I think once the grails went off the scale, people speculated that the investment money would move down a rung. This is now sellers speculating about what the speculators will speculate about next. The interesting question is: will this take some of the heat out of price inflation on the grails as the money seeks other targets or will it just push them up further? It's also a weirdly UK thing. The US reprint titles (Marvel Adventure, Greatest Comics, Super Action, Spectacular, Triple Action etc) don't attract anything like this.

@Garystar This is on the bay at the mo for the princely sum of a fiver, if you're interested. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/166074255757?hash=item26aacc098d:g:r5MAAOSwb19kTV2h Everyone else, a novel old money / new money?

Apparently, I'm an explorer. I'm thinking this: You're thinking this, right?

So the 'all new page epic!' wording was on a different plate to the 30, but how on Earth did it get omitted? Or did the missing one precede the correct one? Waaagh!!!!!

Mmmm. Lovely. You give great montage. 43 does seem to have quite a lot of stamp placement variation as well. doesn't it? ("Donna, when I said do it like lightning, I meant fast, not never in the same place twice"). ( I see Mr. Gold's stamper of choice being more of a Donna than an Ethel).

The Fanzines (well, some of them) do make for fascinating reading. It's often very surprising to see what was actually known about and understood at the time. Often actually more than we know now as information has been lost or lain unnoticed for years. Good spot, Albert.

While we're on the subjects of subscription indicias and the end of Captain Marvel (yay, relevance....or at least, continuity) CM doesn't publish the address where the postage is paid right through the run (spot checked, not every issue), until five to midnight. Issue 60 it suddenly returns.

Indeed we did. I always thought it was odd that Marvel and the others continually struggled (and failed) to sell comics to girls. Over here, just as many girls read comics as boys, and I don't think it was just a younger audience (although girls probably graduated to teen type comics with photo stories and the like while boys were still reading actual comics). I say that like we're not still reading them now.

Amazing. There is something strange about subscriptions. Given that the publishers were cranking out hundreds of thousands of unsold copies every month and that due to an outdated act of congress, second class mail was practically free, this was an opportunity to have an area of sales with 100% sell-through with almost no additional cost (they were mailed directly from Sparta). As you discovered Robot, DC, whose sell through was absolutely catastrophic, seemingly didn't offer subscriptions at all for years. For anyone who has ever lived in the US, the distances are difficult to appreciate with a UK brain. Even if Marvel/DC comics were delivered to your local store, the local store could be miles away and only accessible by road. The world where you hop on your bike and cycle to the shop at the top of the road is not the world that millions of Americans live in. Where Albert & I used to cycle to a dozen shops in the neighbourhood, in rural parts of the US, the nearest dozen stores would be a 50 mile round trip. Why on Earth didn't they put more resource / advertising / marketing behind subscriptions? Or did they and we're not seeing it?

Obviously they were ratcheting up the tension to unbearable levels of suspense. I have to say, given what a hot mess Captain Marvel was for being stopped & started and rebooted, they were surprisingly clear with the last issue, which says there will be a next issue (as so many cancelled comic last issues do) but then goes on to say it will be in Marvel Spotlight when it gets rebooted. Is Rick Jones' girlfriend really called Gertie? She doesn't look like a Gertie. Whatever happened to Louanne? [sigh]

This is nowhere near finished as I think I will have to plot the entire Marvel Silver Age to see the picture on this, but.... I was interested to see what happened to the indicias with regard to subscriptions during the period when ECP was handing over printing to WCP Sparta, which would obviously be a complex time for subscriptions if they were being dispatched from the printers. Something that is weird is that the original titles (everything up to 1964) acquire a note that says: " Printed at World Color Press in Sparta, Illinois. Second class postage paid at New York, NY and at additional mailing offices." and the ones that were started after that don't feel obliged to tell you where there postage is paid, just where they were printed and how much the subscriptions cost. It's odd, because you'd think if there was some change to legislation or post office practice, all titles would be equally affected. It seems like anything started (title registered?) before a certain date is obliged to give this info and anything afterwards is subject to different rules. Weirder still, the 1879 act specifies that the publication must be 'issued from a known office of publication' which means the publisher's address must be published (which it always is). It never says that you have to specify in writing in every publication where it was mailed from (though I haven't read the whole thing, so may be in the small print). So what does 'issued' mean? The publisher's registered office, the place it was physically created (i.e. printed) or the location it was placed into the US mail. As the old ECP issues specify Meriden, which I suspect was the nearest main post office to ECP and the later Sparta ones were mailed directly from Sparta, it feels like it's the place it was mailed from. However, I would think a known office of publication would have to mean the publisher's address and either way it still doesn't explain why the rules for the early titles are different from the later ones. There are big changes to the US mail in 1970, but what on Earth is the line that divides pre and post 1964? I think this simple table will make everything super-clear. Note how it's rife with anomalies. Millie, Thor, Cap & Sgt Fury have a final month at ECP where the indicia changes before they transfer to Sparta. Rawhide Kid (bi-monthly) does not. Marvel Super Heroes has a first month printing in Sparta where it says 'Second Class Postage paid at Sparta Illinois', then it changes to not specifying the address. Likewise Captain Marvel, which starts from issue 1 at Sparta and the indicia changes with issue 2. Iron Man & Subby start with the old ECP indicia that specifies postage privileges authorised at NY with additional offices at Meriden and then they both change to not specifying the address (but continue to be printed at ECP and, despite being new titles, are amongst the last to be transferred to Sparta). More as it happens on this exciting topic.

But you're right. Back to comics....

Wow. You're trying to link via another German actor but you've gone for one who is not actually in any German films. That's a lot of bonus points right there. You have to love the fact that Anton Diffring was both gay & Jewish and pretty much played nothing but Nazis. Now there's some payback. You can actually do it (full disclosure, I had to google this one), like this: Max Schreck in War In Peace with Trude Berliner who has an uncredited role as a baccarat player in Rick's in Casablanca, then Bogey to Audrey Hepburn (Sabrina) to George Peppard (Breakfast at Tiffany's) to Anton Diffring (Operation Crossbow) which gives you John Mills to Hayley (Tiger Bay) to Dean Jones (That Darn Cat) and he's in 2 Herbie films. Technically that's 8 jumps.

That whole thing is fascinating. It really bears out Marv Wolfman's comments about Al Landau. It's incredible that Transworld were allowed to ban the Pembertons from importing any titles that conflicted with their sales (not just titles, but masthead characters) but then, when it came to importing those self-same titles on a subscription basis, it was Transworld who were allowed to do it, not World Distributors despite them being the licensed importers of US Marvels and Transworld not being. From what I've read, the whole thing was a total fiasco. Would be very interesting to hear your friend's recollections of how it went.

Not 'alf. The best part was I literally didn't know a single other movie with Max Schreck (though apparently there are a load). Thankfully, Knock (ironically the knock-off of Renfield) was played by an actor called Alexander Granach who went to Hollywood and became the go-to central European for several years. He's in Ninotchka with Greta Garbo who is in Anna Karenina with Basil Rathbone who is in The Court Jester with Angela Lansbury who is in Bedknobs & Broomsticks with David Tomlinson who is in the Love Bug with Herbie. But once you've got Greta Garbo there are loads of ways to Herbie. I'll say one thing for the MCU - it's made the Kevin Bacon game a lot easier in the 21st Century.

When my gf wants to keep me quiet for 5 minutes, she gives me a Kevin Bacon to do i.e. connect 2 actors by their films in 6 jumps or less. By far the best, and most surreal one she ever gave me was Max Schreck to Herbie (the Volkswagen). I suspect she associated them because they're both German (which tells you everything you need to know about how her mind works).

Indeed. It is fortuitous that the one person he happened to interview completely reinforced the viewpoint of his piece. Also quite surprising that everyone who went to Dark They Were was there because of their 'obsession with the ramifications of the Dracula cult'. Still, without this guy we wouldn't have this wonderful footage, so I will still buy him a pint. Of blood, obviously.

That lady being interviewed is superb. You expect her to say something like 'well, I was getting fed up with Mills & Boon, so I decided to give this a try' but she actually says 'I'd like to violently murder my husband in the nastiest way possible'.

It....it isn't going to get simpler, is it? Hold me, Steve.

Ahhhh. Pence variants with stamps on them. And the stamp is the same price. Thanks Ethel.

Right, gotcha. Sorry, I thought when you said that 51 would have been well out of date, you meant therefore more likely it came at the time. But you're saying it actually did rock up months later. 41 would have been well out of time - it's actually from the first hiatus. I've seen loads of 41's with both sizes of T&P stamp, and this oddbod which looks like a retailer stamp, but I've not seen a 41 with an oblong stamp.

I think this is it, except the chronology is not quite right. FF 51 is before the 2nd (1966) hiatus, so I think that as T&P were circling the drain, IND were looking for alternate UK distributors. The PV's were still being created exclusively for T&P, but nothing to stop IND pinging some cents copies over. But yes, as DG was already distributing nationally to newsagents, this must have looked like pure gravy to him. In fairness, of course, he had identified American comics as the way forward back when he was selling buttons.

Indeed. One tends to focus on the (reported) disruption, but it's actually the continuity that is the key, I think. The piece of the puzzle that confused me was not 'how come there was a disruption to Marvels in Oct-Dec 1966' so much as 'if T&P went bankrupt, how come there wasn't a massive, T&P-wide hiatus'. You pointed out at the time that not only was there no problem with Marvel until the end of the year, but there was no disruption to DC (apart from the usual chaos) at all. This meant it can't have been shipping. The two key points are: (1) why didn't T&P disappear or have any kind of company-wide hiatus, to which the answer is that the comic distribution part of the business never went bankrupt. It was other parts of the business that fell over and it was their LP supplier who had them declared bankrupt, so when the receiver arrived, he simply put the comic distribution piece under one of the company's subsidiaries, floated it off and sold it as a going concern to IND, so it never stopped for a day. I suspect that IND were the chief creditor of that part of the business, so it was never in doubt who would become the owner and (2) why did it affect Marvel and not DC? and the answer is that DC were fishing returns out of the pulping machine and shipping them over at T&P's expense, so the only thing they had to lose was the pulp value. Marvel were printing bespoke, pence-priced variants for T&P, so unpaid invoices were direct cost. Also, Marvel, being strangled by IND, probably needed the money more and, of course, IND would have known they were planning to buy T&P, Marvel surely did not, hence they restricted supply. I think your memories are actually spot on to what happened.