Malacoda

It's interesting - he says that the big turning point of getting into that house was actually the concrete space between the front of the house and the pavement which enabled he & his brother to sell things off a trestle table (mostly which they had made by hand or had been scavenged by their petty-criminal father) to passers by. It's still there where this silver car is parked. Strange to imagine little David Gold standing there over 70 years ago selling those reprint comics about which we've said so much.

It would indeed surely have been Millers. Gold lived at 442 Green St Newham. Millers, which was at 342 Hackney Road, is about a 30-40 minute bus ride.

He's definitely talking about the reprints, not the imports, although they were regarded as the 'yank mags' or as good as. Shortly after this, he puts a date to it: When I was fifteen....I had also finished the conversion of the front room of the house into the small shop where Mum sold sweets, books, comics and cards for many years. With Ralph and I earning and Mum in her shop there wasn’t the acute poverty we had suffered during the war years and directly afterwards, but we were still very poor. That would be 1951.

Round about this time, Gold was in business with his brother and his dad. They were having massive cash flow problems had far too much stock and Gold wanted to reduce the imports from the US suppliers as a solution, so I suspect that might be your answer. In fact, his Dad was trying to swindle him & his brother out of the business and on the day that he discovered his Dad had conned his brother out of his shares and tried to take control of the business, he was so upset at having lost his family and his business on the same day that he broke the habit of a lifetime and drove home in the middle of day only to find his best friend banging his wife in the swimming pool. I think even Jack Bauer would be ready to throw the towel in on that day.

In the 70's, World's deal was direct with Marvel, Curtis were not involved. I assume that means there was some kind of shipping agent / exporter involved in getting them from Sparta to Newark, containered up and shipped to Felixstowe. This is earlier, but I think you're right about some kind of wholesaler / distributor sending over job lots from various publishers. Later, once you're actually in the age of containerisation you've got very large & specific spaces to fill.

Mmmmmm. I very much agree, but that's a really big statement. Another interesting question: whatever the reason for the mysterious numbers on the T&P imported comics, these ones did not have them. Had these very issues been imported by T&P, as they were clearly intended to be, they would have acquired the T&P numbers, but Mr. Oblong Stamp does not feature a numbering system. Why would that be?

I think there was a period where T&P got into payment difficulties which Marvel were slow to react to. This was because, as one of their many, many Balance of Payments policies, the government changed payment requirements for imported goods in 1965 which meant exporters got paid later in the day, which I believe made T&P's cash flow problems less immediately apparent to Marvel who were getting delayed payments anyway. Only when T&P actually declared bankruptcy in June or July 1966 did the dashboard light up at Marvel and they restricted the supply, but with everything taking months to clear, by the time Marvel threw the anchors on, things had actually been resolved. Mr. J.D. Spooner was appointed the official receiver for Porpe and Thorter in July 1966. Somewhere, back in the early Triassic period of this thread, I worked out the dates for when Marvel would have pulled the PV's and it pretty neatly tied up.

Indeed. Well, July, but close enough for jazz.

Yes, I thought you'd enjoy that. Even the guy up the ladder seems to know that history has plans for that word.

Whoops, my apologies. So, a newsstand is exactly what you think it is, like a kiosk you'd see in New York or similar. Small and cramped with the comics / magazines and newspapers amassed on racks and laid out on the counter. You'd typically get these in railway stations and busy thoroughfares. A newsagent is a small store like a 7-11 that sells newspapers and magazines, but also cigarettes, candy, ice cream, cold drinks in chiller cabinets, lottery tickets and a variety of other general items. Newsstand.... Newsagent interior Newsagent exterior

Interesting that this was a newsstand as opposed to a newsagent, as you say, probably different suppliers. I need to put more time into understanding this. As posted previously, I always found the railway kiosk at Twickenham station a happy hunting ground for Marvels that you couldn't get elsewhere. They had more choice and seemed to get the next month's shipment later than all the newsagents,

Makes sense. T&P must surely have got DC's way cheaper than Marvels, so would have had more of them and made more profit from them, so I'm sure they pushed DC. Also, DC owned T&P by this point, so no surprise.

Yes, exactly as you say, it feels like those issues were already set aside (and paid for?) by T&P. I don't think upsetting Marvel was an issue as I imagine it was Marvel who withheld the delivery from T&P in the first place, but as you say, T&P were Marvel's sole UK distributor at the time, so what happened here? I have no idea how the stragglers fit in. I think the fact that they're stamped is key. Had they been brought in by a dealer or sole trader, he wouldn't have stamped them. That in my mind definitely indicates it was a main distributor stamping them for the benefit of newsagents, which makes their straggleriness even more peculiar.

Sorry. Waterbury, Connecticut, home of Eastern Color Printing, Marvel's printer at this point. I did have a moment there where I shouted 'Great Scott! That's it!!', leapt out of the bath and ran down the street naked, as we've all done at such moments (no? Just me then). I thought....the reason these odds & sods got put aside, turned up late and were not distributed by T&P was because the printing changed to WCP in Sparta. They were on a shelf at ECP, who no longer had a deal with Marvel, so they just offloaded them and someone, probably IND, lobbed them into the next crate. Of course, I realised pretty quickly that the dates don't tie up. Printing doesn't move to Sparta until cd Feb 68, but it was a lovely theory while it lasted. Probably not worth the public indecency fine though. Thankfully, it was so cold I was released for insufficient evidence.

No idea what I'm suggesting, tbh. As you say, there a definitely a few possibilities. Why didn't they just give them to T&P? T&P were flogging DC comics from months ago, out of sync, out of order. Something quite chaotic happened.

Fascinating. Seems to indicate that whoever they went to was supplying newsagents nationally. I think the chief suspect is still David Gold. Are we aware of magazines that were published by Magazine Management that were distributed here? Apart from the porn, there were celebrity magazines, film review, humour, romance, puzzle books, all kinds of things. My suspicion for how GSP became the distributor for the Marvel B&W magazines in the 70's has always been that they distributed magazines for Magazine Management initially. Those Marvel B&W's (Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, Vampire Tales, Savage Sword of Conan, Planet of the Apes and even Marvel Preview) which we think of as the Marvel black & white magazines, because they featured Marvel characters and were created by Marvel staff and freelancers, familiar names to us, were actually published by Magazine Management, not by Marvel. If GSP were distributing magazines for MM in the 60's, it's an absolute no brainer that they'd be the most likely recipient of the leftover 66'ers. That FM #8 (April 67) which the Robot posted is a bit of a smoking gun, isn't it?

If I don't believe there was someone taking careful note and going to great lengths to fill the gaps, what do I believe? Let’s speculate: some entrepreneur who does not work for T&P, and we believe it’s David Gold, somehow knows that certain Marvel comics were not imported in these months. How does he know this? Well, he’s distributing to newsagents, so maybe one of his reps hears it and passes on the info that a handful of Marvel comics were not delivered and David Gold thinks it would be worth his time to get into this for a one-off handful of 10d comics? I don’t believe that. So let’s speculate it’s not an importer: it requires a lot of smart work on the part of someone who does not have access to T&P’s records and is therefore contacting newsagents to find out which ones never appeared, bearing in mind that the T&P reps replenished the spinners, not the newsagents, so the newsagents never really knew what was in the spinners and could not order specific titles, they just had a random batch of American comics whacked into the rack by the T&P rep. Newsagents could not have told anyone which specific Marvel comics didn’t arrive. So how did this person find out which ones were missing? Let’s speculate he’s either a collector or comic dealer. There were virtually no comic dealers at this point (and there was not even one comic shop in the UK). This person then found out how to contact Marvel in the States, phoned them and placed an order for these back issues. Except Marvel didn’t keep back issues – they were gathered back up by the distributors & pulped, so he must have contacted local wholesalers? Nonetheless, he/she somehow did this, ordered a batch of very specific Marvel comics by title, number and month and paid for them in dollars, including shipping to the UK. The cost of importing this handful of comics would surely have far outweighed the profit. So if this scenario happened at all, it would have to have been a dealer who went over there with a couple of empty suitcases. But then if it was a dealer, how & why did they get stamped with the familiar oblong stamp and the other one? You’d only do that if you were distributing to newsagents. If you were an enterprising dealer who had gone all the way to the US to get these, not only would you not stamp them, you would certainly sell them for more than 10d or even a shilling. I don’t think any part of this really supports the idea that it was a dealer targeting these specific missing issues. Far more likely: In 1966, payment to Marvel was getting erratic as T&P slid into bankruptcy. Marvel restricted the titles for which they were willing to print PV’s, based on T&P’s now-shaky payment record. Their intention was to send cents copies for the withheld titles for T&P to stamp once T&P sorted their cash flow out. Bear in mind that Marvel’s shipment to T&P at this point was always made up of cents copies (MT, MCIC, FM and Kid Colt for a bit) and PV’s (everything else), so making a few more of them cents copies was not a change in process at all, just a re-shuffle. T&P then actually went bankrupt and there was a short hiatus in ownership, but the comic distribution business was rescued intact by the official receiver – Rothschild – by hiving it off as a going concern into a subsidiary company – T&P (Sales) Ltd – and selling it to IND. This is why you get no break in supply despite T&P going bankrupt. By the time the sale to IND was complete, the cents issues that had been put aside were out of date (or more likely just forgotten & rediscovered), so Marvel sold them as a cheap job lot to a secondary distributor. This is how exactly those issues turned up later – not by cunning detective work by a collector who temporarily set up his own import business and, from somewhere, acquired back issues of exactly the right comics. They simply WERE those issues, sat on a shelf in Waterbury and sold as leftovers to the most obvious candidate: a secondary distributor. It’s less romantic and fun, but it’s very straightforward. It’s the answer Occum would choose.

More than one wave and more than one distributor? I think the Oblong stamps, assuming they’re GSP are one distributor and the shilling stamps are someone else later after the price had increased in Nov 1967.

Agree it was later. These other randos turn up all the way to cd July 1967 by my count, and according to recently discovered ancient scrolls (i.e. the Albert Diaries), he was finding them in July & August 1967, so that ties up nicely. The only bit I dispute is that someone noted it.

Yes, as does the shilling stamp.

Agree, though they do indicate it was not a one-off distributor.

It indicates a clear correlation, but not necessarily that it was a focussed attempt fill the gap.

I agree it’s clearly no coincidence that the ones which skipped the PV print run turn up later as oddly-stamped cents issues, but it is not a clear indication that someone was trying to fill the gaps.

OK, well, since you're asking....

@themagicrobot me too. Something interesting about the GSP sticker - I thought Gold Star Publications was the company Gold formed with David Sullivan in 1972, but it clearly predates that. This is 1967. That FM #8 has collected several distributors by the looks of things.