Malacoda

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).

You're most welcome. And keep in mind, I've basically only posted on one thread, so I've barely scratched the surface of what you've accomplished. Oh, and by the way....

You'll be relieved to hear, the cover was drawn by Ric Estrada, who eventually brought his bad-boy motorcycle skills to the right side of the law. (In the kind of twist you can't make up, Erik Estrada in later life actually did become a cop, sometimes on a motorbike).

Do you think she looks the same? The first lady blatantly has hair by Vince Colletta, while the second lady is so Romita it practically looks like Flash Thompson kissing Gwen Stacy (if Flash had Harry Osborn's hair). Dez Skinn instigated the Marvel Digests including these Young Romances which reprinted old romance stories from the 50's and 60's. This one, despite the title, is actually not a reprint of an issue of DC or Prize's Young Romance, but Marvel's My Love #3 (with less piano). That still doesn't answer the question of how they got away with it, but as there were only 14 issues, I imagine it was gone before anyone noticed. Probably wasn't worth a 13 year Captain Marvel style lawsuit.

That's obviously completely true. Much of what you've researched has never been researched by anyone else and, even if it had been, it would surely not have been to the same depth and with the same relentless, meticulous dedication. Or with the same incisive conclusions drawn. Where you say "I've always liked to own the comics I write about where I can, rather than use other peoples scans" I fully get this. There is nothing like holding the actual artefact in your hands, feeling the paper, smelling it and, in the case of stickers, holding it up to a 200w bulb. However, I think your other great strength has been the courtesy and credit you extend to other (less expert) adventurers in this curious back alley of comic collecting. I think your expertise coupled with the appreciation and respect you extend to others has created a gathering of eagles (bonus points if you can identify where I stole that from) and the interactions that have blossomed in that environment (particularly with input from those who were there at the time) has mushroomed into something far greater than the sum of its parts. I'm not disagreeing with what you say about your methods, I just think you're underselling yourself and your achievements.

I like the fact that she has eagerly filled it in and then (presumably) learnt that she'd have to send it to Pennsylvania and probably was ineligible for the offer anyway. That must have been a sad little moment.

I fully agree with this in principle, but in practice, life's too short to wait years for a knackered copy (of something you don't actually collect) when you know that someone you chat to (probably on here) might have a FN+ copy of the smoking gun run behind them. That said, sometimes you need to get enough of a critical mass to even frame the question. I'm currently groping towards a question for your Alan Class Club thread, but I need to hone it down first.

I hate that. I saw a Doc Strange 179 with what may have been a T&P stamp but it was in a massive bundle. The seller said it was already parcelled up and wouldn't open it to tell me. I was sorely tempted but once bidding went over £500, it was too much money just to find out it was a dealer stamp or similar. Still haunted by it. Good luck.

Something that may be a factor in some of these differences, going back to the war and the post war years, is paper rationing. In the US, Canada and the UK, newspapers were still published, but rationing meant that publishers had to get clever. For newspapers, there was no real choice as they were limited to size of newspaper they could print. In the UK, in 1939, it was reduced immediately to 60% of their pre-war consumption of newsprint. Paper supply then came under the No 48 Paper Control Order on 4th September 1942 and was controlled by the Ministry of production. By 1945 newspapers were limited to 25% of their pre-war consumption. Wrapping paper for most goods was prohibited, so ironically, newspaper would have been even more useful. UK newspapers didn't get back to their pre-war size until 1953 (and I think that was only because Liz got a new hat that year). In the US, there were similar restrictions. When Al Kanter was trying to print second + runs of Classics Illustrated, he did it by buying up paper allotments from 9 different publishers in NY, so you could have bought yourself 9 copies of the same edition and found each one subtly different. When he published CI 7 (Robin Hood) it was so popular it went to 5 editions in a matter of months. Despite being produced across only 7 months, the 3 latter editions came from 3 different printers on paper stock from 3 different publishers. The high suicide rate among Classics Illustrated completists is probably unrelated.

Hey @OtherEric this still won't answer your question about the first specifically UK content that was re-printed in the US, but..... In Switzerland, Rodolphe Topffler comics were sustained sequential narratives featured cartooning, panel borders and were the first literature to tell stories by sequences of interdependent art and prose. The very first American comic-style book was The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, printed in NY in 1842, translated from Topffler's original in 1837. This precedes Ally Sloper by nearly half a century. So whatever the first UK material was, this was definitely the first European material as they were the earliest European comics (in the sense that we use the term).

In the early 90's, when Ford re-launched the RS2000, my company got the only two in the country in advance and almost immediately one of them was stolen from one of our less switched-on sales reps. It being basically the only RS 2000 on the road, the police clocked it immediately and gave chase, but couldn't catch it. The marketing dept at Ford took the rest of the day off. This is the ad from the time. I always thought it was a bit on the nose for a UK ad, until the end.

Indeed. That's an absolutely superb montage. Do you mind if I put the cherry on the top?

Welcome back @Get Marwood & I Now, about this rather beautifully positioned stamp.... What is this? It's an Alan, so it's already got a UK price on it. This doesn't reflect any kind of sale price or discount. Alan famously insisted that all his comics be returned so he could sell them to me again at West Wittering the next summer, so maybe it's something to do with that, but I can hardly imagine newsagents stamping the returns.

You might have opened up way too big a can of worms there, my friend.