Malacoda

You don't happen to have any of Paul Gravett's Fandom Digest's do you?

Regarding our oft-discussed number i.e. what proportion of the Marvel print run was UKPV's ( I know, I'm back on topic, and Steve isn't even here), in 1973, with the impending hiatus looming, Rob Barrow seems very certain that the figure was 6%. Not only does he publish that number with the status of a fact, but he encourages everyone to harangue Stan directly, quoting that figure. It seems to me that Rob was a guy who knew his onions and I find 6% a believable number (there's something about the slight randomness of it...)

@Still Only 35c Hi - Thanks for the link and welcome to what is surely one of the more niche threads on the CGC. Can't imagine why I didn't find your channel before, although the number of comic related threads on You Tube is pretty startling.

We know that Transworld took an astonishingly good stab at reprinting the entire Marvel back catalogue in the 1970's, but actually Odham's made a remarkable fist of it as well in the 60's. Considering that they were really only in the super hero biz for a couple of years, they took a swing at every Marvel title, including Nick Fury and Sgt. Fury, except Daredevil who was only in the Fantastic summer special. They also came pretty close to hitting the buffers on a few of them (they were about 5 issues behind Hulk when they finished, 4 behind the X men and they burnt the whole run of Giant Man).

I agree. When I started collecting again after a 20 year hiatus, I divided the Marvel back catalogue into 4 tiers: 1) everything I had collected up to 1986 (i.e. if I had finished my collection at that point what would it have looked like). 2) those same titles, expanded all the way to the end of their volume ones (in fact I've collected most of the vol 2 & 3's anyway). The above 2 excluded Hulk & Spider Man because (a) I couldn't afford them (b) they weren't imported (c) I had the UK reprints. 3) The above including Hulk & Spider Man 4) Every title, including the legacy titles, back to number 1 (so TTA, TOS, ST & JIM back to number one). The last one is a financial impossibility, I'm sure, but it would be the dream. So yes, you're right, it's never over, but it's nice to measure one's collection against the wants list you had as a child. It feels like a real achievement. It feels like you didn't let yourself down and somehow, you are still you, still connected to the little kid who sat utterly absorbed in that world of wonder, for now we see as through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. Or something less pretentious.

This one is nice. Did you buy this really recently? That crease / colour break from the middle top to the right side looks hauntingly familiar.

I agree with @themagicrobot. 3/2 is mathematically possible, three shillings and tuppence or 38d, but this is way expensive. In 1954, the exchange rate was £1 = $2.80, so 35c was 1 shilling and a ha'penny (12.5d). So compared to US prices, 2/- was daylight robbery, let alone 3/2. As the Robot says, the going rate for these seems to have been 2/- ........ However, this one seems to gone up in price when it was sold second hand Also, seven year old me would never forgive me if I didn't mention.... You can't keep an Earthman down!

Good point, well presented. I've opened it. Actually, I'm rather pleased. It was sold as a FN 6.0, but I reckon he could have got away with a 7.0 or even VF if it weren't for the flaw / nibble at top left. I say that assuming one accepts that the way squarebound books are bound is not a bindery defect, just life. What do you reckon? The corners are surprisingly non-blunted, the paper is off-white and supple, definite non-smoking house, it has clearly never been near sticky or unloving fingers, staples not rusted, no odour, no foxing, bright reflective colours, lots of eye appeal, flat, some tiny creases but you have to hold it at the right angle to see them, one small tear. Spine is in really good shape for squarebound, it doesn't have the issues from unevenness of / too much glue, but the downside of less glue is the innards are just beginning to come away from the cover at the back. I guarantee you're all better at grading than me, so what say you?

I've basically lost 2 rooms. (And counting).

Dude! This looks mighty interesting. I'm just going outside. I may be some time.

Lots of other goodies too. Hard to ignore JLA #1, but the silver trophy surely takes the biscuit. 6,000 comics doesn't sound like THAT much in the context of this guys madhouse, but for context, it's pretty much the whole of Marvel through the Silver & Bronze ages and well into the 90's. Britain's biggest hoarder amassed 60,000 items worth £4m crammed into terraced house - Mirror Online

Right, so it's directly comparable and moreso. A super-key to complete the run. (I know nothing about DC. My ignorance is actually quite wilful - when I do read a comic or see a movie, I have absolutely no history with or relationship to it. The DCCU always therefore has the potential to completely blow me away. I'll let you know if it happens )

So this wasn't Adventure Comics 247 per se, it was because if featured an appearance of the Legion? I would imagine being an Adventure Comics completist would be no small challenge.

So....has anyone else ever had this feeling? This is FF #171. I bought it off a spinner rack in June 1976 (actually off a shelf, I'm using spinner rack as shorthand here). It was the first issue to cost 10p. It was also the first issue to have a bar code. But neither of those is the reason it's special to me. It's special to me because it was the first issue of FF that I ever owned. There was a moment, in June 1976, when this was my entire FF collection. Today, I got FF Annual #1. It arrived in this envelope. Normally, when a comic I really want arrives I can't wait to open it, but the minute I open this one, I am no longer collecting the Fantastic Four. I am still an FF collector in the sense that I have a collection, but I'm no longer collecting because this is the last one I need. After 48 years. You know that bit in Psychoville where Lomax throws the Beanie Baby back into the sea? (Sorry to US readers, that was a local reference) (for local people). I feel a bit like that. I doubt I will ever afford AF 15, ASM 1 or Hulk 1. I need a couple of Caps, a couple of X men and 1 Thor, but they're not expensive or rare ones and can be picked up any time. I've bid on FF Ann 1 many times and lost, but this time I won and it's the last time I'll buy a key/grail and complete a run. I'm sitting here like Schrodinger, savouring the last moments before I open the envelope and end it all. Anyone else had a moment like this?

Just while I'm posting, another of these head-scratchers...

By small print, do you mean the indicia? Interesting. There were definitely, as you say, 6 issues - all without PV's and all ND in the UK. Helpfully, someone in Barnet is flogging all six even as we speak.

That's a nice idea, but no. They were at different printers at different times, and by the time most of them were at Sparta, WCP had presses capable of knocking out the entire print run in days. ( To put numbers to that, if DC wanted 300,000 copies of 30 titles per month, that would be 9m comics in one go. WCP could have knocked that out on one single press in the space of 9 days....and they had an aircraft hangar full of printing presses). To another point, it was possible for a larger publisher with a powerful distributor to crowd a smaller publisher off the newsstand racks, which is what Marvel did to Warren and Skywald once they had Curtis, but that's the number of titles not the amount of copies.

This is indeed a really key question. I assume 'left over' includes returns which we believe to be the stock re-cycled to T&P which may have made it onto US newsstands, but perhaps more likely never made it past the wholesalers warehouses. Outside of comics, there is a strong logic to the overprinting of magazines and periodicals that goes like this: the magazines are created by the publishers, printed by the printers (at cost to the publishers), first distribution to the wholesalers is directly from the printers (so again, no cost to the distributor), then returns are sent back to the wholesalers who signs the affidavit as to how many were unsold and (supposedly) destroys the leftovers / sends them to pulpers or sends them back to the publisher at the publisher's expense. The strangely counter intuitive thing is that distributors don't distribute. At no point are the magazines in their hands. They are more like distribution-financers who make (effectively) bridging loans to the publishers enabling them to keep the presses turning while most of their capital would otherwise be tied up in paper across every newsstand in the country. For this reason, it was massively in the interests of the distributors to demand over-production because they had absolutely nothing to lose. The extra copies printed cost them nothing, nor the distribution, nor the destruction (or return) of all the unsold copies. The only thing that could potentially cost them was if there weren't enough copies of a popular title and it sold out. So their deal with the publishers was exactly the deal you'd make if you were in that position. However, the distribution of comic books was, in most cases, a strange exception to this. The publishers self-distributed. IND distributed DC. Capital distributed Charlton. Dell financed and distributed comics created by Western, but Western created those comics at Dell's behest for them to distribute. We tend to focus on the points where Marvel were distributed by ANC and IND, but they were self-distributed by Atlas, by Curtis and by Heroes World for much longer. This makes the whole question a lot more mysterious. I can see a separate, unconnected distributor putting the screws to a publisher, but do we think that Harry Donenfeld spent years creating massive losses at DC to show a notional profit at IND? It would absolutely defeat the entire object of self distribution. There is some logic to printing these vast numbers of never-to-be-sold comics that we've never discovered. Whilst we suspect that the post office data is not reliable, we know from many sources that vast amounts of comics were printed and not sold. It would be a remarkable coincidence if all of the publishers were making up fictional numbers (as Dick Giordano suggested re Charlton) and all choosing to fictionalise massive quantities of distressed inventory and wasted stock which seems to be consistent between all publishers. I don't believe that. I think what Giordano meant was that they used wildly inaccurate estimates but based on actual business reality.

So I guess that would be when C4 repeated it in 1984? I guess I was very lucky to see it in glorious colour so many years earlier. I remember thinking it was literally the best thing I'd ever seen on TV by a very long way. It looked more like movies looked than TV looked. There were some British series, like the Persuaders and (as the Robot says) the other Lew Grade series, and, of course, several American series that looked really expensive, but I'd never seen anything as smart AND well produced as the Prisoner. It really made you realise that TV could equal and even surpass cinema for the first time.

I wonder if you came to it the same way I did? When I was 12, I sent off for Paul Gravett's Fandom Digest mail order comic catalogue. It contained a big article about the Prisoner and a free fold out poster. It sounded fantastic. I took the catalogue round to my friend's house and said 'we have to find out more about this TV series', whereupon his Dad laughed heartily, took me into the study and pointed to the complete series on VHS which he'd recorded off air when it was repeated in 1976. Their house was being completely gutted at the time, but his Dad set us up with a VCR and TV, and we sat there in a cavernous empty room, save for two squares of remaindered carpet, one for the TV and VCR and the other for me & my friend. We sat and watched the entire series that way. I can only imagine how many people discovered, read or heard about the Prisoner in the late 70's and early 80's, but had to wait until Channel 4 repeated it in 1984 to finally see it. I always felt very lucky. Did you come upon it via Paul Gravett?

Wonderful, isn't it? I know for some people it destroys 'the Village' but for me I was just all the more amazed by how brilliantly they edited it to give you a completely different perception of size, layout and juxtaposition of different buildings. It just made the Prisoner better. I stayed next to the Green Dome (but it's not green any more). Also, no one tells you, but there are some of the most stunning trees and flowers planted into the woods. I guess people must have brought back seeds from all over the world and given them to CWE.

His birthday, today. Gone, but never forgotten. Have you ever been to Portmeirion?

Shan't! This touches on some fascinating areas.....although I do appreciate that I'm in a pretty small crowd with regard to what I find fascinating (the last Distribution Con was just me with a big name sticker and a bloke sweeping rubbish round my feet hinting heavily that he'd like to go home now, please).

Wait....what? So you've got: A 10c US original with dual pricing (should we not be remarking on that?). A 6d 'British edition' which I assume is a reduced price re-cycle of the 9d original with a 6d sticker on it? and then a 1/- stickered British one. So there were stickers to put the price down from 9d to 6d and then later more stickers to put price up to 1/- ? But US imported comics didn't cost a shilling until 21 years after this was published. According to GCD, Bell were producing bespoke comics for the British market for only a very short time around 1946, so this is quite a historic survivor.

This was weird. I was searching on ebay and these two came up right next to each other (because of the number 58).