Malacoda

Sorry, wasn't trying to bait anyone. It was 5 in the morning and I had to be awake for an 8am call, so I was debating pushing through or getting a couple of hours kip (the eternal dilemma). Just as I'd decided I couldn't keep my eyes open I finally found a copy of this trade journal, which I'd looked for a few times It's the catchily titled Newsagents and Booksellers Review and Stationers Gazette (Only Official Organ of the National Federation of Retail Newsagents, Bookseller and Stationers). Accept no substitutes.

Imagine if we could find release dates like this for everything....

Seriously though, thanks for posting. That was a slam dunk reply. One thing that is interesting about those titles is that T&P didn't import every Marvel title, which shows there was some kind of selection process going on (from endlessly examining the MU titles & westerns, I tend to disregard the romances, but I forget clean about the humour titles) .

Indeed. Although I prefer to call it CDO so the letters are in alphabetic order. Seriously, dude, the entire set including the Queen Size special? Do you ever get that moment when you look at your house and it's just more white boxes than a Pink Floyd concert and you think 'Jesus, what have I done?' (Asking for a friend).

Were they ever distributed here? They're actually from the 50's. Charlton seem to have taken a swing a most things to keep the presses turning including publishing books under the Gold Star and Monarch imprints. I think the demise of the book publishing piece was what made Ed Levy get out of the business. It would be interesting to know what the book says about that. Supposedly the closure of the Monarch line was something to do their mob connections but I don't know what. When I read (on Wikipedia) that John Santangelo met "Waterbury, Connecticut, attorney Ed Levy" while serving a year in New Haven Jail and they founded Charlton there, I kind of imagined a Donenfeld-Liebowitz relationship, between a criminal and an attorney, but actually Levy wasn't there in his capacity as an attorney, he was doing a stretch having been disbarred as an attorney. All Donenfeld, no Liebowitz. I'd also be interested to know what it says about the flood in 1955. I just read that the business was flooded out in 1955, but by all accounts it was absolutely biblical.

True. Could be anything. (I just wanted an excuse to post it because I don't think anyone has ever posted Chili on here because it was never distributed to the UK and I can't imagine, apart from the most OCD completist, anyone in the UK has a Chili collection).

I assume this re-stamping (20c to 20c) was US to Canadian,

I agree, it's pretty fuzzy. It's probably more clear in industry, but less clear in a creative field. So for instance, the Avengers logo and the name of the Avengers as identifying a super hero team would be a trademark, but the backstories, powers, costumes, identities of those characters as 'the Avengers' is copyright. and this probably explains how you can copyright a specific publisher's version of characters who are clearly in the public domain like Thor & Hercules. With Captain Marvel, Marvel clearly had no idea where they were going with him. He started out as a Kree military officer, then you get that whole Walter Lawson secret life thing, then the Zo thing which is quickly reversed, then the nega-bands/Rick Jones era where he's basically turned into a super hero (with Roy Thomas recreating the Billy Batson/CM relationship), and then he takes centre stage in Starlin's space opera, then he's all over the place, then killed off in Marvel's first graphic novel, then Monica Rambeau takes the name, followed by 3 others and finally it comes home when Ms. Marvel becomes Captain Marvel. During his original run, Captain Marvel is cancelled so many times and issues were so spaced out that 62 issues were spread over 11 years, with him making a quick guest appearance somewhere whenever the gap got too long. It's really obvious that that character was kept in print to protect the trademark. By the way, I should say I absolutely love the first 33 issues of Captain Marvel. It really is a hot mess.

Indeed, you're right. Even by Myron's standards this was an amazing piece of opportunism. Though Fawcett technically still owned the name Captain Marvel, they were bound by the 1953 settlement never to use it, which meant they were on a hiding to nothing in compelling Fass to desist ( I suspect if the android Captain Marvel had been a success they'd have sued for a slice of the pie, but as it folded in 5 issues, there was no pie to slice). I guess DC couldn't sue him either because they had sued Fawcett on the basis of the similarity of appearance and storylines to Superman, and the Fass/Burgos CM was not like Superman. So the case ended with Fawcett still owning the name, but unable to use it. DC could have used it, but did not own it. This clearly left the door open to Myron, who figured neither one of them had enough skin in the game to take it back to court (especially after round one had lasted 12 years). According to Tucker Reed (the Slugfest book), Fass then sued Marvel the following year (as you say) when they launched Mar-Vell and settled out of court for $4,500, which I guess if Fawcett's copyright had lapsed, Fass was the legitimate owner. Where this gets more weird is that when Bill Black launched a fanzine version of Captain Marvel in 1969 and then, in an abundance of caution, destroyed the whole print run, it was because he feared litigation from Fawcett, not Marvel or Fass or DC. Then when DC actually licensed Captain Marvel from Fawcett in 1972, they found themselves unable to use the name because Marvel took legal action against them. That means, by my count, there was a Captain Marvel lawsuit of one kind or another in the 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's. It's interesting that Roy Thomas only vaguely recalls the Marvel / Fass thing, because he left Marvel in 81 on a specific promise from DC that he could write Shazam and the JSA. However, when you read about how little they actually got told, it's not surprising.

And, of course, it can't have been a makeweight chucked in with a T&P batch because they would have stamped it. My money is on a PX copy re-sold on a market stall. If only those exhausted pages could talk.

That is quite the archive you've got there. Most impressive. Thanks for posting them. You have to say, only Myron Fass would have done this... Carl Burgos: I fancy resurrecting Captain Marvel. Myron: Sure, why not? Carl: Well, it did lead to an unbelievably expensive 12 year lawsuit and $400,000 out of court settlement that caused Fawcett to get out of comics altogether. Myron: Ah, what the Hell.....

It was on the previous posting, so the Robot posted the 1/- stamp to illustrate the norm vs this....

This is where, ironically, Charlton are probably the worst publisher to get into this conversation about. According to Dcik Giordano, at Charlton, they simply made the figure up. Bearing in mind that these are numbers that were required by law to be submitted to the Post Office, so it was literally a federal offence to falsify them, you could forgive the people who disbelieve Dcik Giordano when he says the numbers were utter tosh. However, although the statements were required by law and were notarised and filed, the Post Office only required publishers to file the statements if they wanted to mail their subscription copies at 2nd class postage rates. This was because unscrupulous junk mailers would otherwise have taken advantage of cheap mailing rates to bombard people with unsolicited junk mail (at cheaper mailing rates, you understand, the post office had absolutely no objection to junk mailers blasting people with their poop 24/7, as long as they were paying top dollar for the stamps). So the comic book publishers had to substantiate that they were sending comics to actual subscribers, people who had requested it, not advertising bumpf to people who hadn't. This means that all that recorded data over all those decades actually only exists for the teeny tiny number of people who were subscribers. And if the post office had ever audited the numbers, it was only those subscription numbers which were within their remit to audit, so as long as those were correct & true, nobody would be fitted for an orange jumpsuit. For Charlton, the number of subscribers was virtually non existent (as low as 30 per title in the entire US) so it's not really a surprise that they made up the numbers in the way that Dcik Giordano described because it was an exercise in utter futility anyway and they were never going to get audited on it. What I find absolutely remarkable about that is not just that Charlton even ran a subscription department for such a tiny number, but also, who the Hell were those 30 people who were so intrepidly determined to lay their hands on their favourite Charlton title that they (presumably) scoured the indicias for the head office address and then wrote to the 'subscriptions department' in the extraordinary hope that there actually was one. I can't help imagining, given the numbers involved, that there wasn't actually a full time subscriptions department at all. Just a Flo Steinberg type lady who printed out a few hundred address labels each month.

I used to think I understood this. If you consider it from the distributor's point of view, they have everything to gain from demanding silly numbers of copies and nothing to lose. The distributor doesn't actually get the comics printed, the publisher does. The distributor then effectively buys the entire print run, but it's SOR, so they only pay for the copies their retailers sell. The cost of driving 20,000 copies of a comic to the regional wholesaler in Boise, Idaho is the same in terms of transport, time, man hours etc (maybe a fraction more petrol) as driving 10,000. Then in terms of gathering up the unsold returns, the cost is exactly the same because they didn't do it - the retailers supposedly sent back the covers, later parts of covers, later nothing, to the wholesaler and the rest of it was done on trust (and a signed affidavit). Then only the sold ones are paid for. This means that the cost of buying, transporting, distributing and collecting the returns for 20,000 comics is exactly the same as 10,000 except for the cash flow. The difference however comes in the opportunity cost. If you have a comic that sells out and you have a thousand little boys with their 10 cents in their hot little hands unable to buy the comic, you've lost a fortune. If you keep in mind that Marvel, for instance, had sell through of over 80% on some titles, logically it must have completely sold out in many, many places to generate an overall sell-through of 80%+. So it was completely in the interests of the distributors to cut the throats of the publishers, because all the downside was born by the publishers and the distributors had nothing to lose and everything to gain by demanding high print runs. However, there are 2 big problems with this: (1) sell through that high was practically unique to Marvel, yet they all printed & distributed stupidly high quantities of comics and (2) in reality, they all pretty much self-distributed. IND had the same parent as DC. Curtis had the same parent as Marvel. Charlton outright owned Capital Distribution and so on. Clearly no company lets one of its subsidiaries make a moderate buck by costing one of its other ones a fortune. It defeats the whole object of them having their own distribution companies. The only thing that makes sense of it is the unimaginable geography of the distribution. To have the maximum possible saleable copies of every comic, everywhere all the time, it required the level of overkill. But then, exactly as you say, with all the sales data available to them (ultimately decades of it), why didn't they just tailor supply to demand +x%, with the x% determined by the historic propensity of each area to sell close to capacity (or not). It's just basic business practice. The answer can only be in the fact that they ALL did it for DECADES so there must have been a cost-benefit reason for that kind of overkill.

Indeed. It would be fascinating to know the numbers, but to get the final original comic together was months of work in writing, pencilling, lettering, inking, photography, colouring, engraving, hand tooling, reproduction, stereotyping (don't, we're better than that), routing, moulding onto cylinders, plating, registering, printing & binding (i.e. usually stapling in the case of normal comics). To then knock off an extra thousand copies of the comic took 90 seconds which must have been a small cost relative to everything that went before. Of course, that number is based on Sparta and I imagine the speed over in Derby was not the same, but I seem to recall that Charlton ran the presses to do commercial printing and music magazines and then printed comics at night to keep the presses running 24/7, so it really was just gravy.

Not technically a stamp fight, but I've always enjoyed this one. A UK PV overstamped with Redshade's 6D stamp, but also scrawled on (re-priced?) with a biro at some point in between as well. Steve, I associate this 6D stamp with Millers, which makes Redshade's Detective comic look like one that was distributed by T&P, not sold and returned to Millers by accident. Or am I just making stuff up now?

Without doubt, you're right. US comics with an actual printed pence price were still a rarity (or maybe novelty is a better word). We're in 1961 here. Supes & Bats are standing at the back of the JLA like parents at a school disco, Stan is writing a new resignation letter every week, Jack has returned to the Bullpen but is not happy about it (though you can say that about most years) and Martin Goodman is just wondering if he can get a round of golf in before lunch. I didn't spot the 1/- either until Hawkeye pointed it out. It looks like a design on the tail fin. Newsy McNewsagent might also have written the price to remind him that this cost the astounding sum of one shilling, not ninepence (which itself was a price likely to induce a Cary Grant style double take).

Here's another one for your collection, and, like your Lois Lane, please note that the 1/6 sticker does not mark down a previous 1/9 price as far as I can see. And still they come.....

Speaking of which, have we seen this one before?

Very interesting. The fact that it has the unusual sticker AND no stamp can't be a coincidence. Maybe it was one-off bin-end put out ages late with some re-circulated returns. Imagine if we actually had to build a theory that included & encompassed ALL the mad randos.

Indeed you do not. Great spot. And even more interestingly, this is a sale price one (comics were 1/- by this point), so why did they sticker rather than using that triangular sale price stamp we've seen many times? Are there only 6d versions of the stamp? Can't remember.

I think those kind of pricing guns didn't exist until c. 1972, but the real answer is, of course, our friends.... the stamp numbers. It would have been possible to get stickers printed with the numbers on, I guess, but maybe bespoke stickering was still in its infancy in the 50's and 60's (those stickers that us Gen Xers used to trade in the playground were only invented in 1970).

Wow. I think that's exactly what you have there, except it didn't cross the Atlantic as a lone rando and get stamped there. Archer were a UK publisher of these kind of lurid pulps from 1948 to 1954, but from 1950 to 1952, there were US reprints of the books, which bafflingly retained the UK price and then had a US price stamped on them. Presumably it was cheaper than creating a new plate or maybe a UK price was a guarantee of hard core smut and it was a selling point to emphasise it was an import. Funny when you consider that they were trying to emulate US writers to begin with. Nurse! The screens! Quickly!

Particularly those moments when you found a late arrival or some unexpected treasure that had absolutely no business being there at that time. Then you'd go back there over & over hoping for lightning to strike twice.

I believe our intrepid founder has established Dell pence variants are confined to 1960 and 61 and that Car 54 was not among them. That doesn't mean it didn't come over in some form, of course. I would imagine they would have gone to some lengths to secure a copy. Obviously, having the police sitting around reading comic books is a joke in itself, but having them reading comic books about inept policemen would have been too good to resist. This was all filmed around West London, so although there were no comic shops at this time, there would have been dealers & collectors. Your blog entry is absolutely fantastic in its detail & observation, by the way. Even on this thread, where we pride ourselves on a level of nerdery that makes the average stamp collector look like Keith Richards, this is some really impressive work. Thank you for sharing.