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Malacoda

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Everything posted by Malacoda

  1. Just in case we forget to say it, Happy New Year, chaps. Love You. >Mwah<
  2. Stories about stuff actually being done on the hoof by Stan himself are almost certainly true. From 57 onwards, Stan was the sole employee and used to paste all the storyboards together and do all the production work with the occasional help of Stan Goldberg (the Millie artist). This TGK is maybe a little late - there would have to have been some hands on deck by 1962 as the numbers increased from 8 per month to anywhere up to 12 starting in October 1960
  3. I think it's transitional - it's the first appearance of the white box with the issue number and month. Before this they were colour blended (often not quite perfectly) into the header and afterwards they were more neatly done boxes. I think this is the proto-box. These boxes started appearing on Marvels in May 62 (I believe) when TGK was on hiatus, so maybe when he rode back into town, they had to quickly manually update his template because he'd been on his holidays when the others got done.
  4. Right. Is that TGK 60 a 9d PV re-stamped to 10d, or a cents copy stamped at 9d or a cents copy stamped at 10d? Apologies, I'm sure you've posted before, but experience tells me that searching the thread for a title with a number in it pulls back everything under the sun.
  5. Wow. Those are well before the first hiatus, but are PV's so can't be US returns. That means they're either ones that went down the back of the sofa in the US or at Oadby and never met Ethel until the next year or they were returns from UK newsagents that made the weary trudge back to Oadby and rather than put them back out at a discount, they decided that, quite the opposite, they could get the extra penny if they sent them to the right area.
  6. @themagicrobot @Get Marwood & I Interesting. So the ones with the stickers are both GS issues but 5 months apart....though with DC distribution, they could have rocked up in the same month.
  7. Definitely need to get back to these. I went through the whole of the Panelologist back in the day. Can't remember what else. Very good call, thank you. Incidentally, the 70's hiatuses (I count 79 as a 5th hiatus) was, I believe as much about the oil shock as the paper shortage, although the two are not really separable because oil and oil bi-products are used in everything to do with paper.....logging, transport of raw materials, manufacture of paper itself, transport of paper to Sparta, operation of presses, oils inks & colours, printing, onward distribution, shipping, delivery to Manchester, redistribution throughout the country, returns being sent back.....pretty much everything that happened between the lumberjack cutting down the tree to the newsagent taking our 7p and beyond was impacted by the oil shock. In the space of a few months, it changed some aspects of international trade forever and changed the economies of entire countries.
  8. Ah, back when I just a boy with a dream and a single question. Little did I know the question was actually a Quest. Actual footage of me at the time.
  9. Blimey, this is like all my Christmases came at once. And on Christmas! Ta.
  10. Patience, my friend. At the moment, it's a polo (massive hole in the middle), but when it's ready, it will answer all 34 questions, so I hope everyone will rally round and give the tyres a good kicking.
  11. I would think if you were a newsagent and it was quiet, you'd busy yourself with whatever chores needed doing, exactly as you say. Another point is, of course, that it depends which products the retailer was actually taking from the rep. In our tiny focus, we imagine it was just a van full of comics which needed to be switched out every month, but the T&P reps also sold tights & stockings, cards, toys, games, playing cards, gramophone records and other items that didn't expire, so the idea that the T&P rep had to turn up and replace all the stock every month is an idea you only form if you're a comic book nut (and you know what they're like).
  12. True, but I think also true: if there was room in the spinner rack, it made more sense for the T&P rep to leave it full albeit of older stock than to leave it empty (or to leave the newsagent the opportunity to fill a T&P rack with non T&P product) and secondly, I think some newsagents got re-stocked much more frequently than others. I haven't fully mapped out T&P's sales regions, but some of the differences are striking. For instance, North Wales was part of the Lancashire sales region and the North Wales stock, such as it was, was stored in a 10ft by 30ft garage in Colwyn Bay. The South Wales region was served by a dedicated Sales Manager operating from a massive T&P depot in Bridgend. I would therefore imagine that the newsagents down south got a lot more frequent visits than the ones up North. Of course, we then have all the anecdotal evidence of people finding well-out-of-date comics in the southern resort towns, but that's the other conversation about comics being re-circulated for the holidaymakers.
  13. Dude! I absolutely wasn't trying to browbeat you there. My apologies if it seemed that way. As I said, I think it's a viable hypothesis, it just leaves a lot of other questions unanswered. Likewise, I like Albert's theory that it was a signal to the newsagents telling them when the new comics should replace the old, but again, there are some unanswered questions. I have a theory of my own which actually raises more questions than it answers (34 so far, not joking), so when I finally nail it down, I will submit it and fully expect a light-to-moderate kicking from everyone on the board. But please accept my apologies if it seemed like I was trying to shut you down - quite the reverse, I assure you. Merry Christmas.
  14. I like this theory as it answers the mystery of why they had to stamp each individual comic, and why they didn't re-number the discounted sale comics when they re-priced them and why it didn't matter than the stamps only went up to 9 but I think there are some issues with it 1) How do we explain the bunching? (i.e. runs of issues all having the same stamp number). 2) How do we explain the multi-batching ? (i.e. where we have examples of issues with 3 or 4 different stamp numbers). 3) If that was what the stamps were for, why did the PV's not get stamped? They also had different release dates. 4) It doesn't seem to match people's recollections i.e. comics, especially DC's, seemed to appear in the newsagents much more chaotically than this. 5) Why do they stop? (the on-sale dates make it clear that each cover date was split into multiple release dates in the US long after the date stamp numbers disappear). 6) How come they don't seem to be replaced by any other system that we can identify? 7) How come they seem to fall into neat monthly patterns early on, but then descend into chaos later on. If the purpose was to identify a particular month, what purpose were they serving when EVERY number starting appearing every month? 8) If the date stamping is the answer to how they joined up the cover date months, how did they do it after the system ceased and how did Millers do it and how did World Distributors do it? The system was only in place up to a point and never in place with other distributors, so even if it is for this purpose, it doesn't answer the question for most of the import period. I'd love this to be the answer because it solves 2 mysteries in one go, but I think there a quite a few other questions we have to answer for this to tick all the boxes.
  15. Never going to get that, though I imagine the difference between the 60's and 70's is also total. In the 60's, T&P distributed by their own network of reps who picked up from the midlands and traversed the country, delivering to newsagents one by one, keeping their stocks in local warehouses. In the 70's, World used local hauliers to take massive shipments to local and national distributors who then distributed to newsagents with the daily papers and periodicals. So, even if you had an arrival date for the shipment in the 60's, it could be a couple of weeks or more until they hit the spinners. I think if you had a date for delivery to World, you'd have a much tighter figure. Of course, the other thing I've never quite worked out is where the shipments got consolidated into cover months. In the States, they didn't, they were sent out 2 or 3 months in advance in weekly shipments, but here one thing we all remember pretty clearly is that each month's comics were THAT month's comics, which means that every month, half of the comics that arrived must have been stashed for 4 weeks until the rest of that month's cover date issues rocked up and they were all put together and sent out.
  16. It's a lot of info, gloriously well presented. The on sale dates for comics are really key pieces of data. According to Steve, these are not absolutely gospel, not least because it lists a single on-sale date, but obviously the distribution across the US took a long time, so they were not on sale everywhere at the same time, and presumably not replaced on the shelves a month later, so one date can't possibly fit all. However, there are plenty of instances, really really many, where the on sale date on Mike's matches dates stamped (and sometimes written in pen) on the front covers of comics, so it's a pretty good indicator and can be trusted for every day matters, but if you were using it to prove a theory, you'd want corroboration. I'll leave it to guv'nor to voice any other notes of caution when he gets back from the North Pole.
  17. ooooo yeah. http://www.mikesamazingworld.com/mikes/features/search.php?searchtype=comic&searchtxt=
  18. On the bay today, and substantiating the US distribution date on Mike's. Don't worry....even I have no more to say about this comic.
  19. IT WAS ON THE SITE OF DARK THEY WERE? Can't believe it. It's like finding out Pink Floyd played my local last night.
  20. Did anyone ever actually go to that comic shop? I think it was called Top Ten comics. I always wondered where it was. Ironically, I never saw it come up in lists of the top 10 comic shops, even just ones in London. I mean, if you google Dark They Were, even 40 years after it closed, you've got more links than you can read, but I never seem to stumble onto their shop.