Malacoda

I don't think any of those Super Specials were distributed here. I saw the Close Encounters one and the Battlestar Galactica one in comic shops but they are a very rare sighting in the UK.

Very strong live. Haven't seen them for a few years. Saw them at Wembley Arena (about 60% of the size of MSG, 70% of the Hollywood Bowl).but my favourite gig of theirs was the Royal Albert Hall, just because it's such a wonderful venue.

Last chance to see Roger this year. God knows how he & McCartney & Elton & the Stones & Sparks & the Eagles & Daltrey & Townsend keep going. Springsteen is 73 and he's barely slowed down.

I tell them it’s a crime. Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie

Well, emotionally and psychologically, yes. But space and finances must surely have been insurmountable limits to your collecting? I never had enough pocket money to worry about collecting too many comics, so I never really acquired the mindset that it was possible to have too many. My house now looks like a Pink Floyd concert.

Not to be intrusive, but can you talk us through the filing system? What does Coll 855-414 mean? I can't believe you needed an indexing system by this point. I still don't have one now.

That does look very Tom Sutton, especially the hair, but I'm getting a whiff of Romita off that girl. That can't possibly be right.

Albert, your diaries are a resource like no other. When you say that you went far & wide for these, what sort of radius are we talking? I suppose what I'm really asking is how many shops. My 'far & wide' in the 70's was probably only about 2.5 miles in any direction (max 5 miles if I went to Kingston) but being in West London, that was literally dozens of newsagents & other shops.

After 2.5 years of researching Fred, something amusing occurred to me only the other day. He spent 17 years as a pornographer, and then founded Ulverscroft large print books for the visually impaired. And what is it that they say makes you go blind?

Mmmm. Love the stamp. Obviously a US arrival date, it's something 'Express Newsstand'. I'm convinced that the print order for the monthlies at ECP stayed in the order the titles were launched - they just added a new title to the bottom of the list. This is why Sgt Fury, Avengers, Xmen & DD were the first ones chopped off in all 3 hiatuses. DD was last in line, so if anything was going to miss getting on the lorry and ending up being shipped to the UK as a random leftover batch, my money would be on DD, BUT.....this one appears to have made it into the US distribution system, come back as a return and then found its way over here months later (note the 1/- stamp - it was 6 months before Marvel comics cost 1/-). That's a pretty sexy comic.

Can't've been by me then. If it was me, the explanation would still be going on. Jan 82 is the start of dual pricing, so they didn't exactly go back to normal, anything but, but the month started appearing again. Not sure why it went nuts for a few months before. There's a whole thing about the shape of the price boxes too. This is the start of direct editions in earnest I think so they were probably trying to figure out how to unify everything but prevent comic shop dealers sending back returns, eventually settling on the ISBN strikethrough, then the picture boxes. Steve will be along shortly with the dates. And possibly some tables if we play our cards right.

Is this a reference to when he played Charlie Chaplin or are we talking about showbiz pharmaceuticals? Because he will walk out of the interview, you know.

This is a good point and completely true, but I also think they made a packet out of the comics. If you consider that when DC Thompson published the Beano, they had to create the whole thing, pay the usual bullpen of writers, artists, editors etc, physically produce the comic and print it, they did all that and sold it (using 1967 as an example) for 3d. T&P were not doing any of that, just buying & shipping the finished mag (at wholesale prices in the case of Marvel, and as distressed, second hand inventory in the case of DC), yet they were selling it at FOUR times the price that DC Thomson were getting for comics created from scratch and printed. And if it didn't sell the first time, they just halved the price and sent it round again. I think the profit margins were astronomical. I agree the profit margins on the porn must have been significantly higher, but I imagine they sold far less copies and the amounts seized were mind-blowing. Don't forget that T&P completely got out of the paperback business, lucrative as it was, in 1952, because of the amount of police seizures, which surely indicates that whatever the margins, the problem is that you have to actually sell it to make any money on it. To your point, T&P in fact sold a wide range of goods through newsagents, including comics, magazines, books, records (not just the ex-juke box records, but original LP's). They sold ladies tights & stockings (and I'm not sure what else in that arena). And children's toys. I think that part of it was massive. There was a whole toy department at Thurmaston (like Santa's workshop, except with massive amounts pornography stored next door). I could never quite figure out how (or more importantly why), they maintained this massive operation of sales managers and regional warehouses when it was perfectly possible to distribute comics and magazines to every newsagent in the land via the national distributors, but I think this is the reason. They operated their own stands & spinner racks at the newsagents, the sales managers themselves replenished the racks so they maintained tight stock control, saw what was selling and what was not, and, to your point, kept the high margin items well to the fore. One envisions it as T&P supplying goods for sale to the newsagents, but actually I think it was more like T&P used the newsagents to distribute their goods and pretty much ran a business inside each of the newsagents' businesses. I think your point is also very true of the US distribution network. I think the reason that a lot of the returns came back in the same condition they went out is that they never made it onto the news stands. If you were a news vendor with a tiny kiosk, there's no way you'd give rack space to comics on which you made a penny when you could put out Life (at 40c) or even Playboy (at 75c). You took the stack of comics along with the newspapers and magazines because you had to take what the wholesaler gave you, but it was all SOR and it was up to you to decide what you were going to give up precious real estate to.

A big gap between Heart Throbs? Or....a big gap between Heart Throbs?

Nope. Googled it too, but I feel like we should know it.

Got it once, but not recently. Maybe you've been blackballed.

BTW, the lady who ran the canteen was called Mrs. Kettle. I swear I am not making that up.

Actually, given this demonstration of your artistic skills with window displays, you might want to apply for this.

Dang, we just blew straight past 3,500. Meant to look out for that.

Nice tilting on Gobby there. Sits beautifully.

I know. And you never hallucinate the entire stamp. You start thinking you can see a vague partial roundey shape and then try to make your eyes find the rest of it. My hat is still off to Kevin J for this one.

You're in the 30's there, matey. That's the book van from which Fred ran his mobile library.

At Oadby, the fleet was looked after by an ex-copper called Tom Goodacre who also rode shotgun on the wages van. Given that the wages were all paid in cash, 'rode shotgun' is quite possibly not a metaphor.

Well, funny you should ask. Did you know that in early days of T&P (before our time), before they had the regional depots and regional sales managers, they used to cover the entire country with eight vans, all of which rolled out of the premises at London Road. So tyre pressure was probably crucial on those roads, after the Luftwaffe had finished with them. That is all.